Like so much of the 19th and early 20th century architecture in Louisville, the building at 736 East Market Street, where Taco Punk currently resides, is one that immediately animates the curiosity. Its recessed portico, domed iron and glass ornamental canopy, and ornate half moon stained glass window – which announces simply and significantly the word “EMPIRE” – are the types of architectural features just striking enough to turn our heads and elicit the conscious understanding that something, some other thing, used to happen in here.
If the architecture suggests a building designed as a venue, the suspicion is accurate.
Built in 1900, the structure at 736 East Market Street was one of Louisville’s first movie houses and continued as such for nearly 80 years.
At a time when carnival barkers were hired to stand on the street, strong arming gentlemen and ladies with parasols into paying 10 cents for a glimpse at the modern marvel of the moving picture show, the Empire Theatre opened its doors for business. While little is recorded about the history of the Empire, it has been established that the Dreamland Theater, which opened on West Market Street in April of 1904, was Louisville’s first electric theater and that six others were in operation by 1908. The Empire, then, opened sometime within that four-year period.
With one screen and 501 seats for patrons, the Empire’s business model was, by no means, a sure bet. Those first electric theaters were met with a decidedly un-collegial response by the so-called proper theater contingent in Louisville, who scoffed at what they were certain was a passing fad. Requests to print movie showtimes on the same page of the newspaper as theatrical playbills were denied.
However, as the silver screen secured an irrevocable place in the popular American imagination, larger movie houses were built in Louisville, each more opulent than the last. By the late 1920s, houses like the Brown Theatre and Loew’s Theatre (later The Louisville Palace) would become Louisville’s first run venues, while smaller neighborhood houses like the Shawnee Theatre in the West End, the Uptown Theatre in the Deer Park neighborhood, the Hilltop Theater in Clifton, and the Vogue Theater in St. Matthews, to name a few, would show films in second run.
Distribution receipts from RKO Pictures, which later produced films like “King Kong” and “Citizen Kane,” reveal that, in 1929 and 1930, the Empire was showing films like: “Sally’s Shoulders,” “Sinners in Love,” “The Vagabond Lover,” “Street Girl,” and “Tanned Legs,” among a smattering of westerns and hard-boiled detective films. Evocative as these titles may seem, these RKO films were popular, big budget national releases featuring big name stars. Blue movies wouldn’t appear on the screen at 736 East Market Street until the Empire closed, sometime prior to 1941, and the Shel-Mar Theatre took its place. By the 1950s, the Shel-Mar began offering a more colorful palette of cinematic exploration, with the theater promising that “the hottest films made play at the Shel-Mar.”
The theater was finally closed to the public in the 1980s and the building was alternately used as a storage facility for First Link Supermarket and as a junk shop until the restaurant Toast on Market opened in August of 2006, followed in 2012 by Taco Punk.
Save for a handful of screenings per year at The Palace or the Brown, the era of Golden Age movie theaters in Louisville are none but gilded memories. No photographs survive of the Empire Theatre as it appeared when it was one of Louisville’s first movie houses.
-Joe Manning
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