Loew’s State Theater on Canal Street closed its balcony to Black patrons in September 1950. They no longer had to face mice and three flights of a “rickety” staircase, but they also lost a place to go to watch movies.
Fortunately, the Carver Theater opened on Orleans Avenue at the same time.
“It was the ‘ultimate’ all-Black movie house,” the National Register of Historic Places states. “In contrast to the older Black theaters, which had ‘tired’ seats and out-of-date equipment, the Carver had the latest in everything – state-of-the-art projection and sound equipment, air conditioning, concessions.”
Named after inventor George Washington Carver, the theater was designed by a Dallas architect. The opulent building, which cost $300,000, had 1,050 seats, marble partitions in the bathrooms and a powder room attendant.
“The Carver Theater … represents an important phenomenon in the entertainment history of New Orleans’ large African-American population – the development of theaters in the city’s Black neighborhoods,” the Register states. “These entertainment meccas were of real and symbolic value in the segregated world of separate but typically unequal.”
Closed in 1980, the theater was converted into the Carver Medical Clinic. Dr. Eugene Oppman, an optometrist, bought the building in 1991. After the building flooded during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Oppman decided to restore Carver Theater to its heyday. The renovation cost $8 million.
“I had been in here with people being hurt and people being sick and people being in pain,” Oppman told the Times-Picayune in 2014. “And I said, ‘You know what? This place is going to be a fun place this time.’ ”
The building is now known as the Historic Carver Theater.
“The old structure has aged gracefully,” the theater’s website states, “and is the centerpiece of a cultural renaissance that will stimulate economic development in the surrounding neighborhood.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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