Survey Data
Reg No
50070515
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Historical, Social
Previous Name
Manor Cinema / Palladium / Broadway Cinema
Original Use
Cinema
In Use As
Community centre
Date
1910 - 1915
Coordinates
314247, 234974
Date Recorded
16/12/2012
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Attached three-bay two-storey former cinema, built 1914, having lower two-bay two-storey extension to south-east. Now in use as community centre. Flat roof with balustrade and cornice to parapet. Lined-and-ruled rendered walls to front (north-east) elevation, with giant order of channelled engaged pilasters. Roundel over first floor central window, with cornice curving overhead. Square-headed window openings, having replacement uPVC windows. Elliptical-headed door surround, having central keystone, timber panelled door flanked with sidelights and overlight. Splayed steps to street.
Appraisal
Opened in 1914, the Manor Street Picture House later became known as the Palladium Cinema in 1934, and the Broadway Manor Street Cinema c.1940. The interior provided seating for 630 viewers in stalls and on a balcony. The exterior boasted a glazed iron canopy over the doorway, which has since been removed. The cinema closed in 1956 and has since been used as a clothing manufacturers and most recently a FÁS training and employment centre. The early twentieth century cinema building has a higher parapet height and different fenestration pattern to its neighbouring nineteenth-century domestic buildings. The first cinema in Ireland was opened at the Volta in 1909 in a converted building on Mary Street, and Manor Cinema built in 1914 is of social and historical significance as this building represents an early surviving example of an important social and cultural development in the country. The early twentieth-century building is of architectural interest as a surviving example of cinema architecture in Ireland prior to the First World War. While cinemas continue to be built in Ireland, the single auditorium model has been replaced by the multiplex.