Lourie Theater, St. George SC: History of a 1920s Movie House

The Lourie Theater at 206 North Parler Avenue in St. George opened in the early 1920s as the town’s movie house and has been a live performing arts venue since 1989. It takes its name from Isadore Lourie, a state senator born in St. George in 1932, whose family’s endowment paid for the restoration.

Between the first silent film and the first stage play there were about sixty years, two closures, one remodel, and seven years with the doors boarded over. Then a fire came down the block in 2005 and stopped at the wall.

Who built the Lourie Theater?

The building is credited to David Gavin, a St. George man whose family name is on half the old deeds in upper Dorchester County. The Upper Dorchester County Historical Society has published a Gavin diary from an earlier generation; this David Gavin put up a picture house on the main street in the 1920s, when St. George was a railroad town of a couple of thousand people and the nearest competition was a long drive. A commenter on Cinema Treasures ties the opening to a 1926 film, which would put the first show in the fall of that year, but the state’s own account says only that it opened “at the start of the 1920s” as the St. George Movie Theater, showing silent pictures. Sources differ on the year. They agree on the decade.

The theater did well for a few seasons, changed hands more than once, and then started to slide. It closed briefly when the Depression hit and reopened. In the mid-1950s it was remodeled, which is the era most of the surviving interior details come from. By the end it was running low-budget pictures and public-domain filler. It closed in the early 1980s, about the time multiplexes opened around Charleston and Summerville and small-town single screens stopped making sense.

How did the Lourie Theater get restored?

In 1988 the St. George Development Corporation formed to do something about the main street. The Orangeburg Times and Democrat reported that year that the theater had been boarded up and abandoned for seven years. A research team from the South Carolina Downtown Development Association walked the block and described the building as both the town’s greatest eyesore and its greatest asset, which was a fair reading. The Development Corporation bought it with the idea of reopening it either as a movie house or a stage.

They moved fast. The first plays and concerts went up in 1989. In the early 1990s the Lourie Theater Association took title, and the Lourie Theater Corporation did the upgrades through donations, fundraisers, volunteer labor, arts grants and a share of the state accommodations tax. In 1992 the group bought the building next door, cleaned it out and connected it to the theater, adding a kitchen, restrooms and a reception hall.

The name came with the money. Isadore Edward Lourie was born in St. George in 1932 to Jewish immigrant parents who ran a department store on the main street. The store and the family moved to Columbia, where it stayed open for decades. Lourie went to the University of South Carolina and its law school, sat in the state House from 1965 to 1973 and the state Senate from 1973 to 1992, and is remembered for the state Freedom of Information Act, public kindergarten, the Commission for the Blind and the homestead exemption. He gave up his Senate seat in 1992 so a Black candidate, Darrell Jackson, could run for it. An endowment from Lourie and his family funded the theater’s conversion to a performing arts center, and the building carries the family name.

In March 2003, the General Assembly adopted a concurrent resolution, S. 515, congratulating the theater’s board, contributors and performers on the renovation and on bringing theater and cultural events to St. George. Lourie died in Columbia a month later, on April 23, 2003, at 70.

What happened in the 2005 fire?

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, September 11, 2005, a fire started in a one-story pharmacy in the middle of the block on Parler Avenue. It spread north into a two-story building holding a second pharmacy on the ground floor and a law office upstairs, and part of that building collapsed into the street. The third building on the block, to the south, was the newly renovated community theater. Crews from several departments held the fire there. The theater took minor smoke and heat damage and nothing more.

Cinema Treasures summarizes the loss as three century-old buildings next door. The firefighters’ own account describes two buildings burned and the theater saved. Either way, the Lourie is the oldest thing left standing on that stretch of the block, and the gap beside it is where the pharmacies were.

Visiting the Lourie Theater

Address: 206 North Parler Avenue, St. George, SC 29477
Box office: (843) 563-7262
What it is now: A single-house live venue for plays, concerts and community events, with a reception hall in the annex. Programming runs by season; check the theater’s own site or the chamber office in the Klauber Building two blocks up for the current calendar.
Nearby: The St. George Town Clock at 129 North Parler and the Klauber Building at 225 Parler are both within a few minutes on foot. Parler Avenue is also U.S. 15.
From Charleston: About 55 miles northwest, a little over an hour by I-26 and U.S. 78.

It is a small theater in a small town, and it is open, which for a 1920s picture house in South Carolina is the uncommon part. If you are following the county map, the Lourie sits between the clock and the chamber office and shares a block with the barbershop that turns up in /almost-here/. The dispatches on this site are fiction and keep their own hours. The theater’s hours are posted, and the last show of the night always ends. That is the official position of the house.