“Carbondale History, 1887-1976,” by the Carbondale Study Club (1976):
In the early days of the town, there was a motion picture theater on the north side of Main Street [351 Main, now The Pour House]. Every week there was a show … on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Admission was 10 cents for children and 15 or 25 cents for adults. It was known as Sherwood’s Picture Show. The silent movies, “Riders of the Purple Sage” and “The Iron Hand,” were two films shown. A player-piano made music for the movies. About 1927, it stopped showing silent films.
It’s hard to imagine a time before surround sound, or any sound at all. But, from the creation of “moving pictures” in 1894 until about 1930, screen stories were conveyed using only the actors’ grand gestures, interspersed with dialogue and narration cards.
Even without sound, going to the movies was a treat, especially for children. In “Memoirs of a River Volume Two,” local author Charlotte Graham recalls a 1973 interview with then 69-year-old Cleone Oliver:
“I remember my mother sending me with 25 cents to get a soup bone … R.L. Sherwood owned both the meat market and the picture show, and my, how we’d save our pennies to go to the picture show … The Sherwood family didn’t really get the good pictures … Sometimes somebody would take us to Glenwood to see the really good pictures.”
In the 1920s, the Glenwood Springs theater would have been the Orpheum. In 1907, it opened as the Pastime Theatre, then changed to the Isis, then the Orpheum, before receiving its final designation in 1939: the Glen Theatre. After more than 40 years in operation, the theater was closed in 1983 due to structural issues. The building was demolished in 2002.
But Glenwood Springs had another option for mid-twentieth-century moviegoers, as noted in the Steamboat Pilot (Steamboat Springs) on Aug. 10, 1950:
Construction is well underway on the new drive-in theater west of Glenwood on Highways 6 and 24 … and will be named Canyon Drive-In Theatre.
The novel outdoor theater, which accommodated 325 automobiles, opened Sept. 12, 1950, and closed on Sept. 10, 1979. It was demolished in the early-1980’s for the construction of the Glenwood Springs Mall, where the Mall 3 Theater lasted until 2008.
Glenwood Springs’ last movie house, The Springs Theatre, closed in 2013 after 30 years in operation, when the owners decided it was too much of a financial burden to convert from 35mm film to digital — a necessary move since reels were being phased out of the theater business.
Meanwhile, back in Carbondale, the owners of the Crystal Theatre were facing the same dilemma. In 1984, Bob and Kathy Ezra leased the space in the Dinkel Building on Main Street containing the defunct and dilapidated Crystal Theatre. Its history is described in The Roaring Fork Valley Journal’s Dec. 18, 1975 issue:
What is now the Crystal Theatre used to be the dry goods department of the many faceted [Dinkel Building] operation. In 1950 … a pair of movie house entrepreneurs by the names of Eastling and Campbell had the floor lowered, and set up … one of their most successful operations. The Crystal, at its prime, featured as many as five movies per week. When TV came to the valley in 1959, however, it sounded the death knell for The Crystal [and] the last picture show bit the dust by 1961.
The theater space was subsequently leased for live performances by Colorado Mountain College and the Crystal River Opera Association. Throughout the 1970s, a variety of community shows, from film festivals to children’s puppet theater, were held at The Crystal. Carbondale’s annual spring talent show took place there from 1978 to 1981, when the space was condemned for safety reasons.
The reopening of The Crystal Theatre was announced by the Ezra family in The Roaring Fork Valley Journal on July 18, 1985:
“Dear Editor, yes, the movies are returning to Carbondale. Yes, it’s taken a long time and been a lot of work. But no, we didn’t do it alone … The sense of community support and enthusiasm has really overwhelmed us and fueled us on those days when [opening a movie theater] seemed an impossibility, even to us. For lack of a better word, we say thank you and see you at the movies.”
In 2013, the Carbondale community again came to the aid of The Crystal Theatre, when the Ezras faced the prospect of “going digital or going dark” and launched an appeal to help purchase the equipment necessary to convert from 35mm to digital projection.
According to The Aspen Times on May 20, 2013:
The result has been phenomenal. [The Ezras] are … finding out how people from Carbondale and the rest of the Roaring Fork Valley appreciate their efforts to keep the small, intimate, single-screen theater alive.”
Over a half-dozen movie theaters have come and gone from the Roaring Fork Valley. The recent announcement about the closing of Movieland in El Jebel reduces the number to two: The AF Isis in Aspen and The Crystal in Carbondale.
In 2025, the survival of The Crystal Theatre once again relied on community support, when the Ezras retired and sold the business to the Crystal Theatre Alliance (CTA), a nonprofit organization formed to purchase and sustain the theater for future generations of movie goers.
To keep the Crystal alive, visit www.crystaltheatrecarbondale.com and donate.