Silver bells in the City: The once great theater in Ashland, the Roxy

Every Christmas, Facebook page starts lighting up with an iage of the famed ROXY Theater in Ashland at Christmas.. snow falling.. the scene of cold, but the image is in black and white. Thanks to social media I got my annual reminder on the ASHLAND PA Facebook page of this former amazing location.

If you really want to understand what Ashland once was, don’t look at an old breaker photo or a coal train. Look at the Roxy. When it opened on Halloween night in 1928, the Ashland Daily News called it a $200,000 “milestone on the pathway to our progress,” and that’s exactly how it must have felt.

It was a big-city palace larger than life location dropped right in the middle of a coal town that thought it had a long, glittering future ahead of it.

Opening night was a full-on production. M.J. Carey sat at the brand-new $20,000 pipe organ, the lights went down, and the house fell into that kind of silence you only get when a crowd is actually impressed. There were speeches, hymns, patriotic numbers, a dedication address, and then the screen lit up with Colleen Moore in Lilac Time after a Laurel and Hardy short. Political figure CW Staudenmeier, who would go on to be judge, addressed the crowd.. Just imagine the feeling of what it was like to be in that room, that night.

Seats were just 50 cents for opening night. About ten bucks in today’s dollars.

The Roxy’s organ console itself was a showpiece: it rose up out of the pit on a hydraulic lift like something out of science fiction, meant to make Ashland feel as modern as any big city.

They even turned the town into part of the entertainment. Before the main feature, Ashland residents watched themselves up on the screen in specially filmed local footage.. cars racing through town, pedestrians dodging traffic, a kind of homemade warning film about speed and “possible annihilation.” Imagine seeing your own street, your own neighbors, projected six feet tall in a brand-new theater. The Roxy was proof that we were on the map.

Wouldn’t it be great to know if that video is in some vault somewhere, somehow? It is a new mission–raiders of the lost ark style..

It just HAS to be somewhere, doesn’t it?

Mission: ON.

x x x

For years after that, the Roxy was the pillar of entertainment in a town that didn’t have many other pillars left. This was the place you went on a Saturday night, the place teenagers snuck off to, the place families cooled off in the summer and warmed up in the winter. It was the next act after the old Temple Theater days, when J.V. Schreck was already running shows and bringing in silent films and stage acts. The Temple faded, the Roxy rose, and for a while it really did feel like the future.

But like so many “futures” in the coal region, the shine didn’t last forever. Business and societal changes eventually took it…

By the late years, some old-timers will tell you the Roxy wasn’t exactly sparkling clean..

The stories are of sticky floors, dust in the corners, and a general sense that the place wasn’t being loved the way it once was. At the same time, television was eating away at movie crowds, money was tighter in the Gerald Ford days, and the town around it was already past its own peak. You can almost feel the paint peeling in slow motion in a way..

Then came the messy final chapters. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Roxy’s operators were accused by the major film distributors.. Paramount, Universal, MGM, Fox, Warner Bros. and the rest of the corporate suits.. of under-reporting box office receipts.

The suit claimed tens of thousands of dollars in underpaid rentals over hundreds of films. It’s very “last reel” stuff: a once-proud theater now tangled up in allegations, audits, and lawyers instead of premieres and organ recitals.

When the Roxy finally went dark in 1974, it wasn’t just another business closing. It was a sign that the long, slow ending everyone felt coming in the coal region had finally reached Centre Street.

The breakers had gone quiet, the pay envelopes were thinner, and now even the place that once promised escape from all of that was gone too. The Roxy opened as a symbol of strength and progress; it closed as a mirror, reflecting what had already happened to the town around it.

It had a good run, when you consider it all.

But what feels kinda sorta weird? If you check out the Department of State page, the business that owed the Roxy is still an active business.. Never closed. Forever open? Weird..

So many have owned the property over the years.. And if you loved Cesari’s or Devitos, or shop at the current store that is there, you have stood on the hallowed grounds of the famed Roxy..

Yet ask anyone who remembers sitting in those seats, staring up at that screen, and you’ll hear the same thing: for a few decades, in that dark room, Ashland felt bigger than it really was. And that’s why we still talk about the Roxy.

We also show pictures.

We mentioned before, the annual showcasing of the photos happens on Facebook due to the Christmas and decoration angle. It is such a cool photo that gets passed around:

With the help of AI, and my own Photoshop skills, this is what THAT exact photo would have looked like to the photographer at the time it was taken:

Beautiful.

But in a way perhaps good the building is gone, and this era is over.. because it is still existed today it would most likely be vacant and match some sad facade that exists through coal towns in NE PA..