The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our October 2023 issue.
With no formal business training, Amanda Thorp became an early 20th-century entertainment entrepreneur in Richmond. (Photo courtesy Library of Virginia)
Kathi Clark Wong didn’t set out to write a biography of early 20th-century Richmond entertainment entrepreneur Amanda Thorp.
Wong didn’t know that she’d end up mining a previously unexplored vein of local history any more than Thorp knew she would enter the Richmond arts industry upon a 1907 visit to the city. Thorp realized nobody in the area was showing motion pictures yet, as she did in Bucyrus, Ohio, using a converted storefront she called Wonderland. That epiphany led Thorp to open the Dixie, Richmond’s first permanent indoor movie house, as well as the Rex a few doors down, and theaters called Bluebird in both Richmond and Petersburg; she also bankrolled the original Hippodrome in Jackson Ward.
Wong and her husband, George, moved here five years ago from Knoxville, Tennessee. “We were looking for a retirement place, and we went around like you’d look at colleges with your kid,” she recalls. She’d visited Richmond 40 years prior and was unimpressed, but she discovered a revitalization in the city that matched their expectations in terms of culture, the James River, the food and architecture.
Her background includes newspapering in Monticello, Arkansas, teaching and a driving curiosity. In 2019, a house history for a Monumental Avenue neighbor transformed into a long story about a short street. The detailed monograph, “Building A Neighborhood,” also records the construction career of George Mancos Jr.
Browsing the “Old Images of Richmond” Facebook group, she came across a query by the new owner of 18 W. Broad St. who, without knowledge of the space’s history as the Dixie, named her business The Sideshow Gallery & Residences. Wong messaged the owner, Jennifer Raines. “I told her I’d poke around and see what I could find,” she says with a brief laugh. “And so I say I accidentally wrote a book.”
Her “Nickelodeons and Black Vaudeville: The Forgotten Story of Amanda Thorp,” published by the University of Tennessee Press, follows a novel’s worth of real-life characters during the rambunctious infancy of movies and the burgeoning of vaudeville amid Richmond’s particular divisions of race and class. Wong sought an academic press because she realized the new ground she’d come into. “I was busting some myths,” she says, while not wanting the narrative to sound pedantic. Her lively style and concern for detail make the book an intriguing glimpse into Richmond in a time not often studied.
Amanda Thorp owned the Rex Theatre on East Broad Street, which has been demolished. (Photo courtesy Richmond Public Library)
Thorp arrived here a middle-aged white woman from Ohio without much but pluck and a sense for opportunity. “She had no training in business,” Wong notes. Thorp had a boarding house in Ohio when the moving picture craze gave her the idea for Wonderland. She charged an affordable nickel per person.
Thorp had grown up in hardscrabble circumstances and married a Civil War veteran of the Union Army, Franklin Thorp, who was 21 years her senior. And they lived mostly apart. In Richmond, Thorp claimed to be a widow, which she wasn’t until 1922. “She wore [widowhood] sort of as a badge,” Wong says. But the contrived status may have also functioned as a shield in a male-dominated world.
She came through Richmond on her way to Hampton Roads to experience the 1907 Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. She found here a bustling, thriving city, far larger than Bucyrus — which likely to her surprise did not possess a “picture parlor,” as the term went then, equal even to her modest Wonderland.
Thorp instead found Jack Jacobson showing what he called “movin’ figgers” under a tent pitched in a vacant lot next to the Colonial Theatre at 714 E. Broad St. The Colonial’s owner, Jake Wells, went from playing baseball to booking live entertainment. Thorp soon purchased Jacobson’s business and then rented a room in Wells’ Colonial where she showed movies.
Wells ultimately became a competitive rival of Thorp by squeezing her out of access to first-run films.
Before that, though, Thorp transformed the former storefront at 18 W. Broad into an attractive setting for the enjoyment of moviegoing. Decorative touches included an ornamental pressed tin ceiling and fans to combat Richmond’s enervating humiture, comfortable seats bolted into place, and a notable 7-foot-wide screen, then the largest in town and the first of its kind here.
She named it “The Dixie,” an unusual choice for a woman from Ohio married to a Union veteran managing a theater in the Black neighborhood of Jackson Ward. Thorp, in a too-short later interview, pithily explained that she thought “it ought to go well in Virginia,” and it did. When she started, Thorp didn’t realize that within months she’d turn The Dixie into a place dedicated to Black audiences.
Thorp’s Dixie and luxurious Hippodrome showed Black entertainments for Blacks while whites bought tickets at the nearby Rex and, later, the Bluebird along East Broad Street.
Thorp also tried keeping track of son Waldo, through his numerous brushes with the law, probable alcoholism and frequent marriages. Waldo streaks in and out of the story like an erratic comet.
Despite going into business as an outsider, and a female, in insular Richmond, she made a good living. Thorp bought a dark blue electric car in 1913 and ceased her moving around town after 1923 when she hired architect L.T. Bengston to design an attractive house at 7204 W. Franklin St., which remains.
Thorp was the only woman member of a film exhibitors league in Virginia. (Photo courtesy Chalmers Publishing Co.)
She became the only woman in the Virginia branch of the Motion Pictures Exhibitors League of America. In one of the two known pictures of her, Thorp poses in a formal portrait of that group. She sits, fashionably dressed with one hand on her hip, seeming to survey the 18 men with slight amusement about the situation.
She wasn’t the only person in Richmond with theaters for Black people, but she was the most successful. Another personality in Wong’s story is Black entrepreneur Charles Moseley. His native Atlanta denied him a business license, and then the violence of the 1906 street slaughters there caused Moseley to seek opportunities elsewhere.
He married a Richmonder and here assumed management of a skating rink at First and Charity streets in Jackson Ward. He transformed the space into an entertainment center anchored briefly by a theater he called the Globe for an audience of 1,400. Moseley and his brother William then acquired a formerly white theater, which they renamed the Pekin for Black audiences, that operated few blocks away from Thorp’s Dixie. Moseley went on to Norfolk, where he set up the the New Pekin Theatre. The unusual name comes from a well known Black-owned theater in Chicago.
Thorp required assistance in her business affairs and brought from Ohio the young and gregarious Walter Coulter. They formed a dynamic partnership, working, traveling and living together, from 1905-26. Coulter introduced his brother Robert to Richmond. After Coulter left Thorp, he joined with Charles Somma. Together they built the Brookland Theatre and created their masterpiece, the Byrd Theatre.
Walter Coulter then opened the legendary Tantilla Garden Ballroom while Robert managed the Byrd from the first night in 1928 until his retirement at age 76 in 1971.
Thorp brought to Richmond talent from larger markets, including renowned Black entertainer Bert Williams. (He ran afoul of the law here when accused of spitting on the sidewalk.) Troupes of Black vaudevillians came through the Dixie and, later, the first Hippodrome.
The performances received scant attention from the Richmond press, not even by John Mitchell Jr.’s crusading Richmond Planet, published weekly for Black readership.
“She didn’t advertise,” Wong explains, referring to Thorp. “She didn’t need to. The Dixie sat right where her audience was.” The Dixie’s and Hippodrome’s vaudeville rosters were geared more toward those who could afford the inexpensive entry fees and repertory acts that encouraged repeat attendance — not necessarily Mitchell’s readers.
Blueprints of the original Hippodrome Theater (Image courtesy Fisher and Rabenstein)
But when the Greco-Roman-style Hippodrome opened in May 1913, even The Planet gushed, “The Hippodrome, near the corner of Second and Leigh streets is a place of beauty. The magnificent building fitted up for the colored people is one of the most palatial of its kind ever erected in this city.”
Though featuring some 700 seats, some of the acts Thorp and Coulter brought to Richmond required more space for capacity attendance.
In August 1913, the Hippodrome presented an engagement of a Black revue headed up by Bert Williams, called The Frogs, Inc., which showed for seven previous years in Harlem with enormous success among Black and white audiences. The organization and the productions came from George Walker’s effort to work around white producers and bookers who refused to acknowledge the commercial viability of Black-centered entertainment. The group’s name nodded with mixed innuendo to the ancient comedy “The Frogs,” by Aristophanes, in which the god Dionysus descends into the underworld to retrieve the playwright Euripides, although Dionysus’ slave Xanthias is more clever than his master and consistently gets him out of difficulties.
Thorp and Co. rented the City Auditorium (still standing at 900 W. Cary as a VCU gym complex) with a seating capacity of 3,000. In a reversal of the prevalent segregation of public spaces at the time, whites seeking to enjoy the show received special seating arrangements.
In 1916, Thorp sold the Hippodrome to theater theater manager Charles Somma, and in 1945 the building (under new ownership by then) burned down. The present Hippodrome arose on the site.
Thorp built and sold venues and retired a couple of times. The popularity of movies caused the formation of regional and national chains that pushed aside or absorbed smaller independents.
Then in 1925, Thorp once again built an entirely new theater for reasons that her biographer cannot fully understand. Perhaps the undeniable entrepreneurial drive compelled her while Thorp also sought to address her legacy in addition to demonstrating for men like Jake Wells that she could still make things happen. She oversaw the creation of a thousand-seat theater fit for a “Motion Picture Queen,” as the newspapers dubbed her. She named the place at 1414 Hull St. after the Roman-adapted Greek goddess of passion and Olympian partier, whose coterie included the Graces and Muses of artistic endeavor.
An impressive fanfare marked the premier of the Venus Theatre on March 18, 1925. The electrified marquee of this “Theatre Beautiful,” as Thorp described it, displayed a replica of the ancient and bare-breasted “Venus de Milo” sculpture, which as a newspaper reporter gawped, stood “armless and everything” over the entrance.
Thorp packed the latest innovations into the Venus, “modern in every aspect,” the Times-Dispatch extolled, from its Robert Molton pipe organ (though not the more expensive Wurlitzer) to its Typhoon ventilating system for cooling and heating. She included a stage and scenery fly space, should the opportunity present itself for a legitimate theater production.
“She didn’t need to do this,” Wong observes. “She’d proved herself in business, she broke barriers, she made her money, built her house. The Venus didn’t make any sense — which is strange for her. There weren’t enough people in that neighborhood to keep a thousand-seat theater in operation.” And she was likely already ill with the stomach cancer that killed her in 1927.
Thorp, in the few articles written about her, never mentioned her role in managing theaters that provided affordable entertainment solely for Black audiences, or at least, if she did during an interview, her reflections didn’t make it to print in white-managed newspapers. Given the day’s extreme racial divisions, and her own particular savvy, perhaps she didn’t want involvement with Black films and vaudeville to obscure her role in Richmond of establishing permanent theaters to project “movin’ figgers.”
Wong reflects, “With everything I know about her, everything she did in the business was done to make money. She put on shows that appealed to Black audiences, and she put on shows that appealed to white audiences. This wasn’t an inherent contradiction for her. It’s surprising to me how she got away with some of the things she did.”
Kathi Clark Wong gives a free book talk from 6 to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 3, in the Richmond Room of the Richmond Public Library Main Branch. Wong will participate virtually in the second half of the Library of Virginia’s Common Ground Virginia History Book Group session from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 14; registration is encouraged.
