Feel the daylight-sky ceiling above you, painted for this 1921 movie palace on Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland. Imagine this grand house as it first opened on April 1, 1921, a silent movie theater designed by C. Howard Crane with a capacity of more than 3,000 seats. The very first program was the motion picture Her Greatest Love with Theda Bara, accompanied live by Phil Spitalny and his 35-piece orchestra.
The Allen was fashioned in the Italian Renaissance style and was unusual as a “daylight atmospheric” theater, its ceiling painted to resemble an open daylight sky. Step into the lobby in your mind: a rotunda built to resemble the Villa Madama in Rome, its ceiling populated with Renaissance-style figures from an unknown artist’s imagination that greeted patrons for decades. The theater felt the pressures of changing times — the mid-1960s brought financial troubles as television grew popular and residents moved to the suburbs — and the Allen closed on May 7, 1968, later hosting a Laserium in the late 1970s.
Overhead, that painted daylight sky and the rotunda beyond it still tie the Allen to Roman inspiration and theatrical history.