Wyoming Avenue’s
Theater Row

200 block of Wyoming Avenue

On a snowbound evening in 1936, the 200 block of Wyoming Avenue was already jammed with cars outside a row of restaurants and theaters. Diners had their pick of the Blue Lantern, the Tip Toe Inn inside the Plaza Hotel, a chop suey house, the Paris restaurant, or the Wyoma cafeteria, before walking down to a show at the State, the Academy, or the Ritz — where the marquee that week advertised Charlie Chan’s Secret, released just weeks earlier, which is how close a date this photograph can be pinned to. Every building in this stretch is gone now, cleared for the parking lot and mural that cover the block today.

Then	Photograph, the 200 block of Wyoming Avenue under snow, 1936. Lackawanna Historical Society.
Now	Google Street View. Imagery © Google.
On the fit	Frames arrived pre-matched, so this is a straight crop with no scaling, and it keeps the source photograph’s own frame rather than the series’ usual wide crop. The entire theater and restaurant row was demolished; the one thing to register the two shots against is the stepped tower rising behind the block, now labelled Bank Towers, which lines up in both.