Lorain City Hall/On Area Screens – May 1973

Lorain was really on the move in the early 1970s, with various urban renewal projects getting underway, as well as the construction of the new City Hall.

In my own mind, I seem to mark the transition of 'old' Lorain to 'new' Lorain with the demolition and replacement of the old, decrepit City Hall. I've written about it many times here on the blog, initiating several debates as to its attractiveness and whether or not it was too big.

The above page from the May 11, 1973 Journal shows the old City Hall literally in the shadow of its replacement. The irony mentioned in the article is that the new one wasn't quite ready for the city officials to move into at the time they were being booted out of the old one.

I've included the whole page since its always interesting to see what else was going on – in this case what movies were showing on area screens. The one that leaps out to me is The Poseidon Adventure, an early disaster film, showing at the Tower Drive-in.

We saw The Poseidon Adventure at Amherst Theatre, naturally. I remember the movie was kind of depressing since so many of the main characters in the movie perished while trying to escape the overturned ship. (I also recall the hilarious Mad Magazine parody of the movie, which you can read here.)

I can see that about that time, there really weren't too many family movies to see, except for the latest sappy Disney fare. Camelot was in re-release at Midway Mall, and I remember seeing it there a few years later on one of my first dates. Some of the tunes got stuck in my head, and I was shocked to discover one of my Ohio State roommates was similarly (and unfortunately) afflicted, and only too happy to start singing, "C'est Moi! C'est Moi!"

Other than that, the 1973 movie page is a real grab bag of flicks that reflect the times, including 5 Fingers of Death at the Lorain Drive-in; The Mack at the Palace; 1776 at the Tivoli; Lady Sings the Blues at the Ohio Theatre; and The Legend of Boggy Creek at the Avon Lake Theater.

The only movies that have any star power (in my humble opinion) would be Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw in The Getaway at the Amherst Theatre, and The Wild Bunch, the bottom half of the double feature at the Lorain Drive-in. Believe it or not, I never saw The Wild Bunch until recently, on either GRIT-TV or the 'Movies' channel.

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of 1960s and 70s 'revisionist' Westerns, unless they star Clint Eastwood.