The Aurora Theatre has been running movies at 673 Main Street in East Aurora since Tuesday, June 2, 1925. The opening bill was Gloria Swanson in Madame Sans Gene, a Napoleonic costume picture produced and filmed in France. It was a serious booking for a village theater on its first night, and a film of which no print is known to survive anywhere in the world. The house seated more than 650 people. It still runs on one screen.
Built by men you have heard of
A group of local businessmen put up the money. Two of them are worth naming. One was Irving Price, who had retired young from an executive job at Woolworth and who, five years later in 1930, co-founded Fisher-Price Toys in this same village with Herman Fisher, Helen Schelle, and his wife, the illustrator Margaret Evans Price. The other was Elbert Hubbard II, son of the man who founded the Roycroft Campus a few blocks away.
So the theater was financed by the future of American toys and the second generation of the American Arts and Crafts movement, in a town of a few thousand people. East Aurora has always punched above its weight and mostly declined to mention it.
What stood there first
The Aurora was built on the site of the Millard Fillmore Theatre. That building is the reason the 13th president's house had to move: in 1915 the small 1826 clapboard house Fillmore built on Main Street was pushed back on its own lot to clear room for the theater. The house survived that shove, then moved again in 1930, and the man who paid to move it was Irving Price. Same Irving Price. You can read the whole strange sequence in the post on the Millard Fillmore House.
Fireproof, ventilated, modern
The selling points in 1925 were not the movies. They were the building. A fireproof lobby, the best ventilation and heating available, comfortable seats throughout, and equipment for motion pictures, dramatic performances and musical entertainment alike. That was twenty-two years after the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago killed 602 people in a single afternoon, and a small-town operator advertising a fireproof lobby knew exactly which fear he was answering. An organ by Winer & Sons went in when the building was finished, back when a house this size needed a live musician to make a silent picture work.
Seven owners in a hundred years
Six custodians carried the theater through its first ninety-seven years. Price and Hubbard, then the Blatt Brothers, then the Kowals, then Paul and Lynn Kinsella, who held it for eleven years and moved it from 35mm film to digital projection. On February 1, 2022, Scott Bieler and the West Herr Auto Group bought it and became the seventh owner in the theater's history. That is a car dealer buying a movie house, which sounds like a punchline until you notice how few single-screen theaters in this country have had only seven owners in a century, or are open at all.
It closed briefly for work and reopened on March 5, 2022. It is a second-run house most weeks, with a popcorn shop attached that has become a destination on its own. Recent reporting puts traffic over 3,500 people a month.
One thing it is not
You will find claims online that the Aurora is the oldest continuously operating movie theater in New York State, or in the country. We looked. The theater's own history page does not say it. Cinema Treasures does not say it. The centennial coverage in the local paper does not say it. It is a claim that gets copied from site to site without anyone producing a source, and one hundred years on Main Street is a good enough number without inflating it.
What is true is plain enough: a single-screen theater opened in 1925 has been showing films in the same building, on the same street, for a century, and turned one hundred in June 2025. Very few places can say that. None of them need to say more.
East Aurora packs three landmarks into a walkable few blocks: this one, the Roycroft, and the Fillmore house. The rest of the region is mapped in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Aurora Theatre tee is part of the ALL America City collection, one Western New York landmark per shirt. Buy a ticket, get the popcorn, sit in a room that has been doing this job since Coolidge was president.