Strand Theatre
34 Hanover Street
Manchester, NH 03101
- Operating as of 1932 under the Strand Theatre Co.
- Not listed as of 1934.
- In the August 2, 1935 edition of the Manchester Union and article on page 3 said that extensive repairs to the Strand were being made and that air conditioning was being installed. Management stated that the theatre may open the following fall, but they couldn’t commit to that date. Operating again as early as October 1935.
- Listed again as operating in the city directory as of 1940, managed by Fenton D. Scribner
- 1941 – Part of the State Operating Co, managed by Albert W. Foley.
- 1942 – Managed by Francis W. Lamarre
- 1943 – Managed by Bernard Hickey till 1945
- 1945 – Managed by Albert W. Foley again till at least 1949.
- A 1st run theatre
The Strand was my home in 1970-71, where I ushered (and partied). Managed by Jim Hayes under Mr. Hickey, GM for State Rex, Strand and Pine Island Drive -In. The Strand closed around 1972 and was a prono theater for a short while after that
It was a porno house showing soft-core porn when I went off to college in 1978. So it was more than a few years. Someone told me that the Palace also showed porn, but I don’t remember that. When the Strand showed DEEP THROAT (many years after it debuted — and I wasn’t there, I heard this from my brother-in-law), when the DEEP THROAT crowd was getting out, the Palace was disgorging the audience for the NH Symphony. The two crowds just stared at each other. This was before the home VCR, like around 1976 or so.
I believe The Strand showed one of the Three Stooges rocket movies in the early 1960s. My sisters got to go, and my mother wouldn’t let me and my brother go (we were much too young, just tykes). My sister told me that they opened up the little opera boxes that were always closed (the Strand was originally The Opera House), so packed was the theater. I remember they had a photo of Jimmy Durante on the wall in the early ’60s.
Whenever we’d drive past the Strand (or maybe it was the Palace but I think it was the strand) for about a year in 1966, THE SOUND OF MUSIC would be playing. A solid year. I can still see that poster with a stern Christopher Plummer looking at a carefree Julie Andrews….
Both the Strand and the Palace (a vaudeville house in the Keith circuit opened in 1915) had been real theaters, not just movie houses. The Strand started its life as the Opera House.
loved going into the large big balcony as a kid and watching the matinee in the 60s. I was always a precocious lad and even then when the other kids where whistling and throwing popcorn I was dazzled by the ornamentation of the interior, The theater had been heavily remodeled in the early part of the 20th cent in the style of the Boston Kieth theatres but if you looked above to the ceiling the old coffered wood ceiling of the arts and crafts style of the 1880s still remained I was always the sleuth.. Such a shame it burned but the facade remains