Southampton Playhouse

Southampton has carried on a love affair with the movies since the 1890s when the village’s all-purpose entertainment center, Agawam Hall, showed wobbly motion pictures emanating from the amazing hand-cranked Robertson’s Projectoscope. Today’s state-of-the-art Southampton Playhouse, with its iconic marquee, is the latest manifestation of the community’s infatuation with film. It started with Agawam Hall and went on to include the Crescent Theatre on Main Street, which burned spectacularly in 1924, and the Garden Theatre, recklessly hailed in its day as “the handsomest moving picture theatre in the U.S.” In 1928, Michael Glynne, a colorful character who understood that the movie business could bring a man fame, fortune and beautiful women, added the Garden to his movie-house empire — he had theaters in Astoria, Bay Shore, Patchogue, Greenport and Sag Harbor. He made improvements, but everyone could see that the Garden was becoming obsolete. Glynne decided to build a new theater that would be an opulently outfitted showplace, boasting, among other impressive accoutrements, a massive chandelier. Glynne’s Southampton Theatre opened in 1931 with great fanfare and in its heyday it featured vaudeville acts as well as first-run movies. To preview the best Hollywood had to offer, bigwigs from New York arrived at the theatre in chauffeur-driven limos. It was said that if a movie bombed here, it was dead. The years between these heady times and the recent purchase and renovation of the theater — a fitting heir to its glorious past — have seen various ownerships. It has been twinned, quadrupled, had its magnificent chandelier unceremoniously removed and spent several years shuttered before being rescued and renamed the Southampton Playhouse. Now the marquee’s lights are shining again and the community is once more enjoying movies and more. The proud building has been landmarked by the village.