The Majestic Theatre

The Majestic Theatre opened at 209 North Centre Street on July 9, 1910 — a house for vaudeville and the new moving pictures. For its first two decades it was a substantial downtown house: the Film Daily Year Book listed it at roughly a thousand seats across a gallery, balcony, and main floor, run as a family business on a block thick with theatres — the Lion, the Hippodrome, the Academy of Music, and, from 1927, the far grander Capitol two doors up.

The building is attributed to the theatre architect William Harold Lee (1884–1971) — but the attribution rests on later architectural reference works rather than on any 1910 source naming the architect, so it is best read as a credible attribution, not a documented fact. ⚑

Closed by the talkies (1930)

What ended the Majestic’s picture era was sound. When talkie equipment came to Pottsville in 1928 it went to the modern Capitol and the renovated Hippodrome, not to the aging, independently owned Majestic, and the house closed in 1930. The building did not stay empty — it was remodeled into an indoor golf course, and from 1939 the building served as a farmers’ market for the better part of the next sixty years, its theatre floor hidden beneath produce stalls.

Restored and reopened (2001–2006)

Revival came through public-spirited civic hands rather than private profit. Pennsylvania’s Keystone historic-preservation grants can, by rule, go only to property under non-profit or government ownership, so the purchase of the building by the volunteer Majestic Theatre Association in 2001 was what unlocked state funding. In 2002 Sovereign Bank gave $175,000 for naming rights — the restored house was for a time the “Sovereign Majestic” — and the Association carried a capital campaign to finish the work. Miller Bros. Construction of Schuylkill Haven did the restoration, and the theatre reopened at the end of 2006, during Pottsville’s bicentennial year. It has since quietly set the “Sovereign” name aside and is once again simply the Majestic.

The Majestic today

The Majestic operates as a non-profit community and performing-arts venue of roughly 200 to 224 seats, producing its own plays and musicals and hosting concerts, film screenings, and youth theatre programs; since 2025 it has anchored the annual Pottsville Film Festival. The Majestic Theater Association describes the venue as one of only two “reverse-screen” theatres remaining in Pennsylvania and the last theatre operating in downtown Pottsville — the former a distinction the Association draws itself, the latter borne out by the documented fate of its neighbors, the Capitol chief among them. The building is a contributing building in the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 — a district standing, not an individual listing.