Author Archives: mrdrivein

Southington DI savior is Person of the Year

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Old map of Southington CTThe Record-Journal of Meriden CT printed an article about annual community awards this week. Person of the Year honors went to Anthony Denorfia, who purchased the former Southington Twin Drive-in property, allowing the city to preserve and run the drive-in with proceeds going to charity.

“Denorfia said he lives by three guidelines: to work hard, be the best person he can be, and to always give back.” Those are good guidelines for us all. Congratulations.

This is the same Southington that was going to be the subject of a drive-in documentary filming during its Halloween celebration. I can find lots of references to that as an upcoming event, but nothing that says how it went. But I did find a link to the video that the RJ shot on opening night. Enjoy!

Cascade also turned to Kickstarter

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Cascade Drive-In, from its Kickstarter pageFrom the St. Charles (IL) Patch comes word that the Cascade Drive-In (West Chicago) tried a Kickstarter campaign to help finance its conversion to digital projection. That seems to be the Illinois thing to do, as shown by the Midway (Palmyra), the Harvest Moon (Gibson City) and the McHenry Outdoor Theater (McHenry).

The article makes the Cascade sound much more optimistic that some of the others. It says its owner “has been in the drive-in theater business all his life and has no plans to close.” It also suggests that he hoped Kickstarter would prevent him from having to borrow to finance the new equipment. Unfortunately, that campaign ended last week with only $1248 pledged toward the $100,000 goal.

Clicking around on Kickstarter, I see that the Harvest Moon campaign also failed ($49,449/$120,000), as did Midway‘s ($7536/$40,000). With only a few weeks until its Nov. 28 close, the McHenry campaign is also in trouble ($27,143/$130,000).

I’ve seen Kickstarter projects work, though for smaller amounts. Wired has a nice primer on how to run one. Adapting its advice to drive-ins, I would add that a theater needs to offer something tangible and valuable for donors. Maybe give two free tickets in exchange for a $25 pledge, or a Carload for $50. I also would amplify Wired’s last idea: Facebook. There are a lot of drive-in patrons (and a lot of drive-ins) on Facebook, and a good appeal there can ripple out to bring in more fans who might become donors if the appeal and the deal are good enough. Want to give it another try?

Did DI owners speculate on land? Not all of them

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A few weeks ago when the Cottage Grove DI closed, I included a link to a Minnesota Public Radio interview with a local drive-in historian. If you listened to the interview, you learned that one of this guy’s main points was that the wave of drive-in popularity was really a wave of land speculation. According to him, sharp real estate guys guessed that big tracts of suburban land would be valuable within a decade or two, so they built drive-ins to occupy those spaces to get a trickle of income while they waited for Walmart to be invented.

That’s a really interesting theory that I hadn’t sufficiently considered before hearing it. In retrospect, I’m sure a certain percentage of drive-in landowners had this in mind. (Note that the owner of the land was sometimes different than the operator of the drive-in.) But what was that percentage? Were the majority of late-50s drive-ins on speculators’ land? Or was it just a small fraction? I suspect that quantifying the motives of landowners half a century ago will always be an impossible task.

What got me thinking about this was the quiet announcement halfway down a page in The Daily Record (Baltimore MD) that someone is building a townhouse development on the site of the old North Point DI site in Dundalk MD. As you can see by the Google satellite image above, taken in 2012, nothing of consequence has been done to this site since the drive-in closed. According to the Daily Record story, “(t)he last picture show there was in 1982.”

I’ll grant you that among the thousands of drive-ins that proliferated in the 1950s and 60s, at least some of them were built because of land speculation. But I don’t think that paying property taxes on idle land for 30 years was part of that plan. The North Point is just the most recent example that shows that if speculation was the goal, some of these drive-in landowners didn’t do a very good job of it.