Reviving the Echoes of Lost Applause

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

There was great excitement in Patchogue in 1923 when Ward and Glynne's Patchogue Theater opened as an opulent vaudeville house, its art deco marquee illuminating a prosperous Main Street. Stars such as Bette Davis, Douglas Fairbanks and composer John Philip Sousa graced its stage as the street filled with new models hot off the Ford assembly line.

But the Depression and changing public tastes took their toll. Vaudeville died, and the Patchogue Theater, shown in the late 1920s photo above, at right, lived on as a movie house. The theater finally darkened in the late 1980s, as did many of the neighboring mom-and- pop stores, succumbing to competition from the malls and multiplexes.

There was more excitement up again, part of former Mayor Steven Keegan's dream of a Main Street renaissance. The expanded, streamlined 1,250-seat theater was reopened by the village as the Patchogue Theater for the Performing Arts with live entertainment produced by the Gateway Playhouse.

Though the theater and Main Street have had their ups and downs, the future looks brighter today than it did in the 1980s, says lifelong resident Marjorie Roe of the Patchogue Historical Society.