Keith Albee:
A History
adapted from an article by Tony Rutherford

The Keith-Albee opened May 8, 1928, at 925 4th Avenue, on a site which had been the Zenner-Bradshaw Department Store and The Huntington Advertiser.

The opening of the Keith-Albee marked the zenith in the careers of Huntington showmen A.B. and S.J. Hyman, who began their careers in 1912 at the Lyric Theatre. When the Keith opened, the Hyman brothers also operated the State, Orpheum and Huntington theatres.

Designed by Scottish-born architect Thomas Lamb, the Huntington theatre was one of three similar structures erected under the supervision of the B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee vaudeville interests. The Keith-Albee's sister theatres were the Keith in Flushing, N.Y., and the Stanley in Utica, N.Y.

Thomas Lamb

Lamb's specialty had been "exotic, classical" theatres, but with Huntington's Keith-Albee, he incorporated the growing popularity of an illusion of magnificent amphitheatres under moonlit skies. The Keith-Albee was Lamb's first Spanish atmospheric vaudeville theatre.

When the theatre opened, The Herald-Advertiser called it "a perfect theatre … comparable in every detail with the finest theatres everywhere. Marts, mines and quarries of the four corners of the earth contributed to the luxurious magnificence."

The new $2 million theatre was second in size only to New York's Roxy Theatre. The stage, which measures 45 feet in depth, 90 feet in width and 83 feet in height, was exactly patterned after both the Capitol and Roxy Theatres in New York. When it opened, the Keith seated 1,800 on the lower floor, 1,000 in the balcony and 200 in the loges.

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