Photo from the Sunset Drive-In Facebook page

It’s Day 296 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. It was time to sweep through some of the drive-ins along the New York / Pennsylvania border, so I started by driving 2½ hours from one Sunset to another – from the Sunset Drive-In in Middleport NY to the Sunset Drive In just southeast of Waterford PA.

Waterford’s Sunset opened on June 10, 1948. The first movie shown was The Westerner starring Gary Cooper. The Theatre Catalog list of drive-ins that year named the owners as Ray Woodward, E. Wilson, and Alden Phelps. Those three names shifted around in the ownership records for the next couple of decades. In 1958, the Huntingdon PA Daily News said that Phelps was the owner. The International Motion Picture Almanacs for 1955-66 listed Woodward.

The drive-in showed X-rated movies for a while in the 1970s into the early 1980s, as evidenced by advertisements in the Titusville Herald. Who knows who owned it then?

The modern era began in 1988 when Dennis and Margaret Koper bought the Sunset. Dennis told WJET, Erie’s News Leader, “The wife liked to go to the movies, so I bought her a movie theater!”

A story at GoErie.com says Dennis began working at the Sunset in 1968 as an electronics technician. That should mean that he’s comfortable with the digital projection system he installed before the 2013 season. The couple has had 30 years of owning this humble drive-in, and I hope they continue with it as long as they want. For now, it’s closed for the season.

I wish I could have embedded a couple of minutes of nice video here, but you’ll have to go to YourErie.com to watch. Then you can watch a half-minute of video recorded earlier at YourErie. Then you can check out some nice photos at GoErie.com.

Miles Today / Total: 138 / 33661 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 182

Nearby Restaurant: It had been a long time since I’d gone for Chinese, and I was happy to find Maggie’s Chinese Inn in Waterford. It’s not a buffet, so everything’s prepared fresh. The egg drop soup, my personal measuring stick for Chinese restaurants, was great, and I find shrimp fried rice to be a certain kind of comfort food.

Where I Virtually Stayed: The closest hotels to the Sunset are past Waterford to where I-90 scrapes past Erie. And one of those, less than 10 miles from the drive-in, is another Hampton Inn. It’s a place where I know what to expect. Coffee all the time in the lobby. A comfortable room with all the modern amenities. The great Hampton breakfast. Yes, I’m spoiled that way.

Only in Waterford: According to Wikipedia, Waterford contains a statue of George Washington wearing the uniform of an officer in the Virginia Militia. In December 1753, at age 21, Washington was asked by Governor Dinwiddie to carry a British ultimatum to the French on the Ohio frontier. Washington delivered the message at Fort Le Boeuf in present-day Waterford. The message went unheeded because he delivered it to the wrong person.

Next stop: Family Drive In Theatre, Kane PA.

The Moonlite marquee as it looked five years ago. Photo by Mike Kerick from the Carload Flickr pool

The drive-in revival continues to build. According to The Citizens’ Voice of Wilkes-Barre PA, a man has applied to the local county zoning hearing board to be allowed to renovate and reopen the Moonlite Drive-In of nearby West Wyoming PA.

Eric Symeon of Exeter said he is negotiating to buy the property from the West Wyoming Borough, which owns the vacant site, contingent on zoning approval. The borough council seems willing to cooperate with the necessary variance to the otherwise residential area.

According to his application, Symeon wants to show movies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights between May and September. He wrote that he plans to repair the concession stand, ticket booth and screen. Based on Mike Kerick’s Flickr album of Moonlite photos from five years ago, Symeon has plenty of repair opportunities.

The slow decay of the single-screen Moonlite site has been well documented online. To watch nature reclaim the vacant lot, compare an aerial photo from the Moonlite’s heyday with this 2011 Google Earth photo and the latest from 2016. For ground-level narratives with lots of photos, check out this July 2008 post from Forgotten PA and this May 2013 entry from the Drive-In Theater Adventures blog.

When did the Moonlite open? Exactly when did it close? I could only find a few clues from Carload World Headquarters. It wasn’t listed in the 1955 Theatre Catalog, my most recent edition, so it probably opened after 1955. (It was definitely open by 1967.) I found another TCV article from 2010 that said the Moonlite’s former owners sued the borough, alleging that “sewer installation in the early 1990s caused increased water-retention issues that thwarted potential sales of the property in 2005 and 2006.” A borough solicitor said the site suffered from flooding before the sewers were installed, and that the Moonlight “has not shown a movie since the 1980s.” A PDF from that lawsuit says “the Moonlite Drive-In operated until approximately 1991.” (Hope that Symeon has a good drainage plan!)

Back to Symeon. “This is something I always wanted to do since I was little,” he told The Citizens’ Voice. “Every time I’d drive by, I’d see it just sitting there. Everyone in the valley knows about it.” The projected opening is Summer 2017. I look forward to hearing more about this project.