Regent Theatre, New York City 1913
(Museum of the City of New York)

Regent Theatre, New York City 1915
(Museum of the City of New York)

Rialto Theatre, New York City 1916

Tally’s Electric Theater, Los Angeles 1915
(cinematreasures.org)

“Harlem was already a major center of entertainment with respected theaters and an opera house. In April of 1912 New Yorker Robert S. Marvin joined with Baltimore-based businessmen Charles J. Kuhlmann, James McEvoy, Jr., and William H. Hudgins to form the St. Nicholas-Seventh Avenue Theatre Company. Its sole purpose was to build and operate “theatres, halls and other places of amusement” which would include those specifically for “moving picture films or other motion pictures.”
Only two months later the new firm spent $100 on the lot at the southwest corner of 7th Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue and West 116th Street. The natural choice for its architect was Thomas W. Lamb—already renowned for designing legitimate theaters. It would be a career-changing commission. Of the over 300 theater designs Lamb eventually designed, the majority would be movie houses.
The resulting Regent Theatre, completed in 1913, was among the first, if not the first, monumental movie palaces that would flourish through the next decade. While drawing on the established form of the legitimate Broadway theater, Lamb used an exotic, romantic blend of styles to lure patrons to the wonders inside. Extensive multicolored terra cotta cast in Italian Renaissance, northern European and Mannerist styles exploded in exuberant arcades, loggias, balconies on a diamond-pattern base.”
Dayton in Manhattan

TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 142 ff.