The Beacon in New York Typifies Dylan's Love of Theaters

Yes, it's the Beacon. Photo courtesy Nelson French.

Nelson French, Duluth Armory board member whose brother lives in the Hibbing home Robert Zimmerman grew up in, sent me a number of photos last week of the Beacon Theater where Bob Dylan performed in November.

For those unfamiliar with the layout of the city that never sleeps, The Beacon is a historic theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side at West 74th and Broadway. It's a handful of blocks from the Museum of Natural History to the Northeast and the Dakota, where John & Yoko lived, to the Southeast.

Entering the Beacon. Courtesy Nelson French.

The Beacon has nearly 3,000 seats, opening as a movie house in 1929, the earliest days of the Talkies. The Marx Brothers's Cocoanutes and Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, his first film with sound, were released that year. Today the theater is a live entertainment venue owned by the Madison Square Garden Company.

Not the grandeur of The Beacon or The Roxy.
For Ritz in Hibbing you head over to the high school.

Reading about the Beacon brought to mind how Bob Dylan's early life was undoubtedly touched by the movies. When the Zimmerman's moved from Hibbing to Duluth in 1947 his uncles--Max, Julius and Sam Edelstein-- built the Lybba theater at 2135 1st Avenue. The theater, incidentally, was named after Bob's grandmother Lybba Edelstein. The theater closed in 1982 and has since become the Sunrise Deli.*

Growing up going to the Lybba may have in part been behind Dylan's surprise move to purchase the Orpheum in Minneapolis in 1979. Dylan would have been nine when The Gunfighter came out starring Gregory Peck, one of my own favorite old-time Westerns. Gregory Peck appears years later in the Dylan song "Brownsville Girl" on his album Knocked Out Loaded.

Well, there was this movie I seen one time 
About a man riding 'cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck 
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself...

Peck played the role of Johnny Ringo, a gunfighter who was tired of being on the run, never able to settle down because every kid show-off wanted to make a name for himself... Alas. Dylan was more likely to have seen this at the Lybba than years later on Saturday Night at the Movies on television. He very likely saw Moby Dick there as well, another Gregory Peck feature film, when he was 15, a novel itself would later be cited in his controversial Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

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Inside the Beacon. Courtesy Nelson French.

Inside the Beacon. Courtesy Bev Martin.

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The 1977 termination of Dylan's marriage to Sara may have contributed to his returning to Minnesota for a season. His interest in the power of theater birthed in him a desire to purchase the Orpheum which was itself birthed in 1921 on Hennepin Avenue, the main drag in Minneapolis.

I can't say how much time Dylan spent in Minnesota at that time, but I know he had a place on the Crow River west of Minneapolis next door to his brother David. On one occasion a friend of mine at that time had a dentist appointment and was in the waiting area a while. When he went in, he saw Dylan getting his teeth worked on in one of the other rooms there. Proof once again that all these stars we admire are just as human as we are.

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A Brief History of the Edelstein Family and Hibbing Theaters 
By David Edelstein* 

The story begins around 1922. My grandfather Julius was a poster hanger at the Victory Theater that was on First Avenue about three blocks from the Homer Theater. The Homer Theater was next to the Homer bar. Today the Homer Bar is still open and there is a building next door with an awning — it may have been the theater but my Dad isn’t sure — it may have been in the empty lot to the left. My grandfather Julius and his first cousin Louis Deutsch worked at the Garden Theater until about 1929. 

At that point talking movies came out and the Garden closed due to the cost of sound conversion. They had amateur night at the Garden and Frances Gumm (Judy Garland from Grand Rapids) and her sister came over and performed in 1927. 

Louis Deutsch moved to Virginia and owned the Granada. The Homer and State Theaters were owned by MACO (Minnesota Amusement Company — part of Paramount Publix, I believe, until the divestiture mandated by a Supreme Court case). In about 1936 Julius and his brother Max decided to reopen the Victory. 

Around 1939 MACO offered Max and Julius the job of running the Homer and they closed the Victory. The Garden was converted to the Gopher around that time and they also ran the Homer. There were other people running the State Theater at that time. Ticket prices at the Homer were 15 cents, Gopher 30 cents and State 40 cents. 

Max Edelstein also ran one of the Chisholm theaters with Bob Berquist and may have been a part owner. In 1948 the famous Paramount case was decided by the Supreme Court and the studios had to divest themselves of the theaters they owned. Around this time the Lybba opened, it was originally built in cooperation with MACO, but they weren’t playing fair, so the family split the Lybba off from them. The State and MACO were bought by our families in 1964. 

Things are looking up. Inside the Beacon. Photo courtesy Nelson French.

As for other places to watch movies, Nelson French sent these additional remarks: "I don’t know who originally built the Hibbing Drive-in, but the family bought it from Stan McCullough about 1967. Mann Theater Corp. from Minneapolis bought the State, Lybba, MACO and Granada theaters around 1978. We held onto the Hibbing Drive-in until 1980 and I think it was torn down in 1985."

Ah, but those were the days.

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* David Edelstein was son of Mel Edelstein, who owned and managed the State and Lybba Theaters, and later went on to manage the Orpheum in Minneapolis for Dylan and his brother David.

Here's one more  beautiful theater where Dylan has played, the Cadillac Palace in Chicago. This one was built in the Roaring Twenties, and it looks like a jewel.

Related Links
The Beacon
The Lybba 
The State
The Orpheum
Hibbing MN Bob Dylan Walking Tour
Dylan Still at the Top of His Game

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Listen to the music.