The organ inside the Riviera Theatre did not travel far to get there. Wurlitzer built it in North Tonawanda and shipped it on November 19, 1926, to a theatre a few blocks from the plant. Opus 1524 has been playing in that room ever since: same instrument, same building, same city that made it. There are not many theatre organs left anywhere in the country that can say all three.
A Rochester firm, an Italian Renaissance room
The Riviera opened in 1926, built by the Yellen family and billed as the showplace of the Tonawandas. The Riviera's own history and Cinema Treasures both put opening night at December 30, 1926; a lone commenter on Cinema Treasures argues for 1930, which nobody else supports. The plans came from Leon H. Lempert & Son of Rochester, patterned after the Italian Renaissance, and the interior painting was done by Ferdinand Kebely working out of Willard M. Lusk's Rochester studio. Roughly 1,140 seats. The building went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
If the architect's name sounds familiar in this part of Niagara County, it should. The same firm drew the Palace Theatre in Lockport, which opened July 18, 1925, about seventeen months earlier and one canal town upstream. Two Lempert houses, two canal towns, both still running shows. That is a better survival rate than the movie-palace era generally managed.
Opus 1524
The Riviera's Mighty Wurlitzer is a Model 235 Special, and the word Special is doing real work. It was one of two original Wurlitzer demonstrator organs, instruments the company kept to show buyers what a theatre organ could do. It left the factory with an Oboe Horn rank substituted for the usual Salicional and a five-horsepower blower instead of the standard seven and a half.
This was not an accident of geography. Wurlitzer bought Eugene de Kleist's North Tonawanda barrel-organ works in 1909, absorbed Robert Hope-Jones's organ business in 1914, and moved theatre-organ production to North Tonawanda. Between 1914 and 1942 the plant turned out more than 2,200 pipe organs. A town that had been making carousel band organs started making the instruments that scored silent film, and one of the demonstrators ended up down the street.
Talkies arrived and the organ went quiet and fell into disrepair, which is the usual ending. It is not the ending here. Carlton and Harry Finch began rebuilding it in 1944, later hands enlarged it, and a full restoration brought it back in 2008. It still plays.
The Naked Ladies
The console left the factory in plain ivory. In 1928 the theatre was leased to Shea's Operating Corporation, which redecorated and, according to Cinema Treasures, had figures of women painted onto the console during the work. They are still there. Generations of North Tonawanda kids have known the instrument by that detail rather than by its opus number, which tells you something about what people actually notice in a movie palace.
A chandelier with a previous address
The fixture hanging over the auditorium is not original to the Riviera. It was bought from the Genesee Theatre in Buffalo before that house closed and installed in 1974. It measures 10 feet across and 14 feet tall, and the crystal count is usually given as 15,000 French crystals. Buffalo lost the theatre. North Tonawanda got the chandelier. That trade has come up in conversation more than once.
The organ people bought the building
Here is the part that matters most. The Riviera is not open today because a developer saw an opportunity or a city wrote a check. It is open because the Niagara Frontier Theatre Organ Society, a club of people who care about pipe organs, bought the entire theatre in the late 1980s to keep the instrument in its room. Sources put the purchase at 1988 or 1989. The society later renamed itself the Riviera Theatre and Organ Preservation Society, which is an honest description of the sequence: they came for the organ and inherited a movie palace.
Volunteers spent the 1990s stripping and repainting and rewiring. The marquee was restored in 2014 with the original paint colors and new neon. Digital projection went in the following year. The place books concerts, films, dance, and comedy now, and the Wurlitzer still comes up out of the pit.
Wear it
The Riviera Theatre tee is part of the ALL America City collection: one real Western New York landmark per shirt, no generic skylines. North Tonawanda has two more in the lineup: the Herschell Carrousel Factory, where the town's other great music-and-machinery story lives, and Gateway Harbor at the western end of the Erie Canal. For the rest of the region, start with the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it to a show. The organ is worth the ticket on its own.