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From 1908, when the road shows started coming to the Teck, until 1956, when the Erlanger closed for good, the ghosts of Cornell, Russell, Arliss, Hepburn, and hundreds of other stars flitted routinely across the Buffalo stage, leaving, by all accounts, an indelible impression on the collective memory of the lucky patrons.
It’s almost impossible to discuss the Teck or the Erlanger without mentioning the other. They were architectural opposites—showgoers loved the acoustically perfect, rococo Teck, but merely tolerated the stripped-down Georgian style of the acoustically challenged Erlanger.
For a time, the same booking agency—the Erlanger Buffalo Theatre Corporation—ran both theaters, and when the Teck couldn’t survive the lean times of the Depression, the agency simply moved the road shows and their ghosts to the Erlanger, which, by the early ’30s, was the only commercial legitimate theater in town. Memories abound of great shows at the Erlanger, but most shows were booked there out of necessity, not out of choice. There was nowhere else to go.
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Image courtesy of Anthony Chase.
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According to Buffalo Evening News theater critic Ardis Smith, the Teck was “where the great ghosts really walked.”
The German Young Men’s Association built the Teck’s original structure at Main and Edward Streets—“way out there”—in 1883 with the hope of reproducing one of the great opera houses of Germany. For a few years, the building was filled with the music of Beethoven and Bach, but its short life as a music hall came to an end in 1885, when fire ravaged the building and burnt down neighboring St. Louis Church. The hall was reconstructed, this time with thirty-six-inch stone walls to prevent any future blazes, but it fell on hard times until Jacob F. Schoellkopf, a local tycoon, bought the hall at auction for $6,000 with an eye—and ear—toward transforming the gigantic, ponderous castle into a theater. Schoellkopf died before he could see his dream realized, but the trustees of his estate honored his legacy by naming the theater after the Castle Teck, which stood atop the mountain overlooking Schoellkopf’s birthplace. The Teck opened in 1901 during the Pan-American Exposition.
After several years of local stock companies holding sway, the Shuberts, three brothers from Syracuse, leased the Teck in 1908, and began booking their own shows, bringing in the best talent from around the country.
As an unnamed writer for the Courier-Express said in 1939: “If the Teck has ghosts, no other theater in the country could have more glamorous ones. The greatest names in the English and American theater appeared on its billboards and no history of the American musical comedy could be written without mementoes of the Teck.”
Indeed, the programs from the Shubert-Teck read like a “who’s who” from American theater’s golden age. The luminaries include Buffalo-raised “First Lady of the Theater” Katharine Cornell (see p. 70); British great George Arliss; famous Shakespearean duo Julia Marlow and E. A. Sothern; Sir Henry Irving, who supposedly inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Lillian Russell, who was the most popular singer of operettas at the turn of the century; and, perhaps most famously because it was the Shuberts’ first booking in 1908, Al Jolson, who as an unknown member of Dockstader’s Minstrels, sang a song, stole the show, and launched a career.
After the market crashed in 1929, the Teck ran with a local stock company, an occasional road show, and, of course, movies. It was largely demolished in 1940 for scrap metal for the war, but, a few years later, the remaining shell was outfitted as a Cinerama movie theater, a novelty that made the old-timers long for the glory days of the ornate playhouse.
The Erlanger was never as beloved as the Teck, and although its long-term viability as a legitimate theater seemed to be doomed from the start by a number of unfortunate circumstances, the Erlanger booked a remarkable amount of talent through the years, including the Marx Brothers, Alfred Lunt, Sidney Greenstreet, Jack Benny, all three Barrymores, Orson Welles, Lillian Gish, Boris Karloff, Gloria Swanson, Tallulah Bankhead, Sydney Poitier, Edward G. Robinson, Ed Wynn, and dozens of other stage and screen stars. Katharine Hepburn came to town a number of times, most famously for The Philadelphia Story in 1940, in a weekend block of shows which overfilled the theater to near bursting proportions. And no matter what the financial climate might have been, the plays of Katharine Cornell—including the occasional critical dud—proved to be, as Ardis Smith said, “the calculable, ever reliable bonanzas on Delaware Ave.”
E. M. Statler built the Erlanger in 1927, across the street from his grand hotel, at the corner of Delaware and Mohawk. Statler leased the theater to the ruthless manager A. L. Erlanger, who had been taking over multiple theater projects in different cities, all named “Erlanger” or “Erlanger’s.” (Erlanger had made his fortune by forming the Theatrical Syndicate, the centralized booking agency that controlled access to almost every theater in the country until equally ruthless groups like the Shuberts started buying up theaters to break up the Syndicate’s monopoly.)
The Buffalo Erlanger was designed by Warren & Westmore of New York, the architectural firm that had worked on Grand Central Station, and had built the Hotel Statler, as well as the Biltmore and Commodore Hotels in New York.
Let’s just say Warren & Westmore’s expertise in designing hotels did not translate to designing theaters.
Even though the press initially touted the Erlanger’s plain design and its modern conveniences, including what was at the time a state-of-the art ventilation system that purified the air with ozone, the theater suffered from a number of major technical inadequacies. For one, the backstage was tiny by industry standards. And according to a particularly scandalous rumor, the Erlanger suffered from an acoustical dead spot which spread out circularly from the middle of Row J.
In a feat of bad timing, the theater opened (with tickets made of gold) two years before the market crashed, bankrupting A. L. Erlanger, who died soon after in 1930. Despite diminishing box office receipts during the Depression, the Erlanger Buffalo Theatre Corporation—which the Shuberts had taken over—continued to book the theater until 1941, when Nikitas D. Dipson of Batavia purchased it. Dipson was the owner of the movie house chain that bears his name; the Erlanger was never his primary business concern. In 1955, Dipson retired, and after the theater changed hands a couple of times, the Kavinoky family converted it into the 120 Building, which was razed just a few years ago to clear space for the brand new federal courthouse.
Although there are plenty of reasons why the Teck and the Erlanger experienced only a few decades of profitable road show business, the most significant reason of all could be that in 1927—at the end of the Teck’s moneymaking years, and at the start of the Erlanger’s run—the movies started talking. How ironic that Al Jolson, who created a smash on the Teck’s stage and ushered in the road-show business in Buffalo, would rise to become “the World’s Greatest Entertainer” and the star of The Jazz Singer—the first “talkie” and perhaps the watershed moment when movies began to replace the theater as our premier popular entertainment.
James Walkowiak enjoys movies, taking new routes home just for the hell of it, and cooking soup.
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