Girard Theatre
The abandoned Girard Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the roof of the former supermarket is visible in the center before the stage.
Updated July 17, 2020 | By Matthew Christopher
Designed by John Bailey McElfatrick, the Girard Avenue Theatre opened in 1891. Barely over a decade later, it was gutted by a fire in 1903 caused by electrical wiring which did $25,000 worth of damage to the building. The next year it was rebuilt, but went bankrupt roughly ten years later.
The Girard Avenue Theatre reopened in 1919 with the Keith Vaudeville Exchange headlining. According to a terrific history by Hidden City, it featured "“high-class vaudeville” acts (as opposed to the Summer Stock and Minstrel Shows the theater previously held) until the structure was converted, following a design by Ballinger architects, to a movie house in 1927. Rumor has it that around this time a teenaged Milton Berle worked at the theater."
As the economy of the surrounding neighborhood declined, the Girard Theatre showed movies on a single screen, and as much of the area was demolished in the Urban Renewal period in the 1960s, it closed and Klein’s Self-Serv Market opened in the lobby in 1967. Years passed and the marquee and ornamentation on the facade were removed, leaving a listless, anonymous brick hulk of a building that barely gave any impression of what its former life had been.
The former facade of the Girard Theatre after it had been converted to Klein's Food Market but before the ornamentation and marquee were removed
In November 2019 a friend invited me to go photograph it with him - on my birthday, no less - as demolition was already in progress and the building would soon be gone. I had tried to gain access through the supermarket before, as it was the only way to enter the theater, but was unsuccessful. Now, there was only some plastic construction netting sealing off the abandoned supermarket, which had changed names twice and settled at the Fine Fare Market before closing for good. As we entered the columns and lip of the mezzanine were visible but a drop-tiled ceiling obscured the rest. We climbed over some rubble in the dark, went up a sketchy staircase, and were out in the old theater.
There's a certain feeling you get when you're in a place you can tell almost nobody has been in for decades, a sort of temporal overlapping of what it once was and what it has become. The Girard Theatre had been inaccessible since the late 1960s, forgotten, with a little supermarket slapped together on the first floor. Did people who shopped there ever feel it around them? Do people ever look at the banal little constructs in their ordinary lives and wonder if perhaps they only exist in the mouth of something much grander that has laid dormant for decades? I'm not a superstitious person, but places do have a presence and the echoes were certainly there if you looked at the columns or rim of the mezzanine in the supermarket. I think we often interpret things as what we see and not much more or less, so maybe it's doubtful that anyone would have sensed the rest of the building, but those sorts of questions do haunt me.
Regardless of the answer, at least two generations of people would have gone about their business in the area and shopped at the store without seeing the bigger picture it existed within. It's not a stretch to think that until the demolition began and the doors to the outer world were sheared off in the process, sunlight hadn't touched the interior since the fire over a century earlier. These doors now hung open off the second and third floors of the building to sections that no longer existed - to the jumbled mess of debris that had been what I presume was the grand staircase in the lobby, for example. I could see the shimmering skyscrapers in Center City when I looked out of them. It seemed like a part of another world.
Beautiful decaying plaster faces adorned the Girard Theatre's balconies
Stopping back a month or two later, much of the building was gone. I often lament Philadelphia's reckless demolition of its historical heritage, to the degree that I get tired of typing the same tropes about its wastefulness. More should have been done to properly document the interior of the building. More could have been saved from it. There should have been more acknowledgment of its worth in terms of the fabric of the community that once was there. But these things can impede demolition: if you want to tear a place down, it's important to move quickly, before people have a chance to even discover what they're losing or think too much about it. Otherwise the process becomes more contentious, slower, more costly.
You can't save every building, and the idea that the Girard Theatre could have been magically brought back to life for its former purpose is ludicrous. Its time had passed many years before the demolition and it was just waiting for a wrecking ball that forgot it existed for 52 years. Still, it was something to see the crumbling ornamental faces on the balconies, or the odd way the floor curved both around and upward in the middle, or the forlorn little market built like a blanket fort in the middle of it all. It made me wonder, as these places often do, what strange and magical things are around us that we live in ignorance of because of a few walls that obscure our vision of them. Those things don't last forever, and there must be so many that we'll never see or know.
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