The Todd Art (Sigma) Theater and a Lost Brown Street Business District

The old firehouse currently home to Jimmy’s Ladder 11 restaurant on Brown Street is a beautiful but isolated survivor of what was once a thriving neighborhood business district. One of its most significant neighbors was an old theater located at 924 Brown Street.

Built in 1922 by the Blanchard Building Co (headquartered in the Lindsey Building), it was a brick structure with a pressed brick front. In addition to the 500-seat auditorium, the building had two retail spaces on the first floor (tenants included the South Park Shoe Repair Shop and the dental office of Dr. C. F. Deller) as well as 3 offices upstairs and an apartment where the theater’s first owner Robert J. Hirsch lived.

The Sigma Theater was called “South Park’s finest building” when it opened.

The first production was Owen Moore in “Reported Missing,” which was shown along with a two-reel comedy.

A notable feature of the theater was its $6,000 Marquette organ, a type which was typically only used in the “big churches of the country and in many of the larger picture theaters.” In those early days of film, one article stated that “the music is often the greater attraction and many of the patrons of the Sigma enjoy the music at this little amusement house as much as the films themselves.” The organist at the theater in the 1920s was Miss Lee Strait (Dayton Daily News 5/4/1924).

The theater was intended to attract people to the Brown Street commercial district, at the time “one of Dayton’s busiest outlying business centers” which had an excellent mix of shops and everyday necessities in close proximity: “Were a high wall to be built about this section it would be almost self supporting for everything needed for human necessity and amusement will be at hand. It will be a little city in itself.” (Dayton Daily News 9/17/22)

A drug store across the street from the Sigma courted the post-show crowd with an advertisement stating that “a soda at Whitaker’s after the show makes the evening complete.”

Other stores on the same stretch of Brown included the Chas A. Rogge grocery, Jos. J. Schad hardware store, J. Yassalovsky tailor shop, and White’s Sweet Shoppe which offered ice creams and sherbets as well as club sandwiches in the evenings.

Brown Street veers west and becomes Warren Street today, but it used to also continue uninterrupted to the north and connect to the remaining small stretches in South Park and the Oregon District.

The theater has a connection to one of Dayton’s celebrity residents, Martin Sheen, who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. In fact, according to his memoir, the humble theater was a major reason why Sheen decided to become an actor:

“When I was about five or six, I started going to movies at the Sigma Theater, a second-run movie theater on Brown Street between a fire station and a bar. The people on the screen there felt familiar and comforting, and gradually it began to dawn on me: I was one of them. That was the feeling I’d always had about myself. I was an actor” (Along the Way, Sheen).

The 1960s was when the theater began to shift its focus, as recounted by Curt Dalton in his great book When Dayton Went to the Movies, a chronicle of over 90 Dayton theaters both downtown and in the neighborhoods.

The theater sold to John Holokan in 1961, who formed a partnership with John C. Keyes, who “invested $10,000 and completely remodeled the theater, installing new projection equipment, seats, carpeting, interior decorations and rest rooms.” They renamed it the Little Playhouse, a nod to Keyes’s late father W. A. Keyes who had remodeled the Apollo theater downtown in the 1930s and also named it the Little Playhouse. But it only lasted until 1965, when Keyes pulled out of the business.

“We … spent $10,000 fixing up the theater for old classics and art type films”, he said, “but the fans proved all they want is sex and sensationalism”. It was briefly renamed the Sigma again, and then took on the name of Cinevu, which featured a very large curved screen called the Ultra HarveyScope, which according to inventor John Harvey, “literally draws the viewer into the action and gives the picture depth.”

In 1969, it was again renamed the Todd Art Theater, managed by Emerson Newman. As Dalton writes, Newman was “formerly connected with the Ohio Follies on S. Jefferson St. Local newspapers stated that residents near the Todd Art feared that the theater might turn to this form of entertainment. It wasn’t long before this fear became real. Although Todd Art began with a policy of showing foreign double features on a sub-run basis, it wasn’t long before they turned to showing adult movies.” In addition to the films, it also became a burlesque house in 1974.

The theater closed in 1992 and was demolished in 1994, a fate which the rest of the street would also suffer (aside from the fire house building).

I’ll need another article (or perhaps a series, or even a book) to fully cover the losses of buildings in this area, many razed for the expansion of Miami Valley Hospital over the years.

The commercial building that lasted the longest was the old Becker’s Market building at 860 Brown Street (one block north of the theater), which was razed in 2020. Note the orientation of the buildings to the street, which shows where the old Brown Street used to extend uninterrupted all the way to Fifth Street.