Tired old farmers, spritely young wenches, fiddler and dance master, hombreros and sun bonnets, blue denim and gingham, square dance and quadrille, Charles Chaplin and Spanish senoritas mixed colorfully last Saturday night at the Montauk Theatre, after the benefit movies, to the delight of many spectators.
That’s what the East Hampton Star reported in 1928 after a square dance and costume party at the Montauk Theatre on Main Street in the dead of winter. The festivities were a fundraiser to build a Presbyterian church, whose congregants temporarily held services at the movie theater. The theater was also a venue for benefits for the Montauk School, like one featuring a skit called “School Days” starring E.V. Conway and a cast called the Famous Players.
In fact, the theater’s opening show on December 16, 1926, was a Christmas production by Montauk schoolchildren, according to an account by the Montauk Historical Society noting that all 500 seats were filled. The stage was also used for vaudeville and minstrel shows, again mostly fundraisers, as well as film screenings.
The theater’s initial life as a movie house connected it to East Hampton in that Leonard Edwards, who opened East Hampton’s 1,035-seat Edwards Theater in 1926, also leased the Montauk space and managed that cinema. At first the programs were silent films accompanied by a pianist who insisted on playing “My Mother Gave Me a Nickel to Buy a Pickle” no matter how solemn the movie, Ruth White recalled in an oral history interview.
“And you’d have some of the saddest things up there … and he’d be playing ‘My Mother Gave Me a Nickle to Buy a Pickle.’ You remember that song? And he’d be banging away at that thing while you were crying … I guess it was the only song he knew how to play.”
The Montauk Theatre building itself was owned by Albin Pearson of the Pearson Construction Company, which developed many Montauk properties – including the soon-to-be-completed Presbyterian church, the Montauk School, and residences in Shepherd’s Neck and elsewhere – during the period of growth initiated by Carl Fisher and the Montauk Beach Development Company. It was, like most of the other structures, “finished in stucco with a half-timbered Old English effect,” the local newspapers reported at the time.
W.F.E. White, an East Hampton druggist, rented the storefront to the west of the movie theater, while the Montauk Utility Company (and later “Ma and Pa Honey’s hardware store”) moved into the one to the east. The Pearson company kept an office on the second floor, as was prominently noted in both an advertisement and the news section of the Star at the time.
Unfortunately, the movie business was not enough to make a go of the middle storefront. A sound system was added in 1931, and movies starring Joan Crawford (This Modern Age) and Claudette Colbert (The Secrets of a Secretary) were screened as late as October of that year, but the cinema stopped showing movies soon after. It continued to be used for community events, however.
Not long after the Hurricane of 1938, the Montauk Post Office, which had been located in the old fishing village on Fort Pond Bay, moved into the theater space. Dick White Jr., whose parents took over his grandfather’s drugstore next door during the Depression, recalled living on the second story of the theater building as a child, beginning in 1941.
“So every morning, Mr. Cook, the postmaster, would come down there at around quarter after five in the morning,” he said in an oral history interview, “and he would hand-cancel the mail that had been dropped in the box the night before because it went out on the six o’clock train from the railroad station. So every morning I woke up to [here he tapped loudly on a table] two on the ink, one on the envelope, two on the ink, one on the envelope.”
“That was … right under where I slept, so that was my alarm clock.”
One day his mother, Ruth, threw his clothes out the window because he left them on the floor despite her telling him not to:
“Now where did it all land?” Mr. White asked. “On the sidewalk in front of the post office where all the people had to step on it or over it. Naturally I had to pick it all up, bring it all back and put it away,” he said. “I never did that again.”
In 1961 the Montauk Post Office moved into a new building at its present spot, and a number of different businesses have taken over the middle spot, most recently Kai Kai Sandals. Meanwhile, White’s Drug Store was sold and moved into a huge new building on the Plaza (which closed this fall), while White’s Liquor Store moved from the east to the west side of the former theater space. White’s Liquors remains in that spot to the west, while Winick Fine Jewelry (formerly Montauk Printing) occupies the space to the east.
To the south, across the street, stands another Pearson-constructed building that today houses Shagwong Tavern and Herb’s Market, among other businesses in what today is a fully developed business district.
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