On Chapel Street, in New Haven, Connecticut, opposite the Old Campus: from the time of glaciation, cultivated by the Quinnipiac; in 1614, charted by a Dutch explorer; in 1638, colonized by the Puritans; throughout the American Revolution, home of the signer, Roger Sherman, his second wife Rebecca Prescott-Sherman, their fifteen children, and the family store; in 1860, industrialist Gaius Fenn Warner's Italianate villa, by Henry Austin; in 1880, Marshal Peter R. Carll's Opera House; in 1884, the Republican League; in 1887, the Hyperion; in 1903, the Union League addition, by Richard Williams; in 1926, the Roger Sherman Theater; beginning in 1976, a tradition of French fine dining, that continues today. While the Roger Sherman house is no longer standing, it holds up all right.
"In the 1991 book 'Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun' (Bullfinch Press/Little Brown and Co., $29.95), writers John Margolies and Emily Gwathmey rhapsodize about the lost era of the movie palaces. (The first, they write, was New York's Regent, built in 1913.) 'The buildings were ceremonial structures in which we… Continue reading An Acre of Seats in a Garden of Dreams