Crest Theatre, Granville

About

Crest Theatre is a heritage-listed former cinema and ballroom and now community centre at 157 Blaxcell Street, Granville, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney Australia. It was designed by Cowper and Murphy and Associates and built in 1948 by A. W. Edwards Pty Ltd. It is also known as Hoyts Crest Theatre. Following its purchase by the Australian Blouza Association, it has been referred to as Blouza Hall. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 1 August 2003.

Cinema was first established in the suburb of Granville at the Granville Picture Palace which opened on Saturday 3 September 1910 on land adjacent to the old Post Office in Railway Parade.

In 1911 Alfred James Beszant organized screenings of films at Granville Town Hall on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. In 1919 Beszant became the sub-lessee of the Picture Palace.

The Castle Theatre in South Street was erected in 1911 in a paddock in South Street and was capable of seating 800 people. The Castle had lofty castellated towers, search light, arc lights, small coloured electric lights and a screen larger than the Sydney Glaciarium. The electric lighting was powered by a dynamo driven by a steam engine in the nearby woolen mills.

In 1923 Granville Cinema Ltd was formed with the principal shareholder Alfred James Beszant of the Avenue, Granville. This company took over the operations of both the Castle and Picture Palace. This company built the Granville Cinema on the corner of Parramatta Road and Good Street, which opened on 28 April 1924 which has since been demolished.

The Granville South Crest cinema was built by Hoyts ' Western Suburbs Cinemas Ltd on land leased at the corner of Blaxcell and Redfern Streets from its owners, the Roman Catholic Church. It was the second of two Quonset cinemas built in Granville by Western Suburbs Cinemas, the first being the Granville Hoyts Castle in South Street which opened on 26 December 1947 and was built on the site of the original 1911 Castle Theatre (this theatre still survives but has been heavily modified and is now used as a public space).

The Crest opened on Easter Saturday, 27 March 1948 with "The Swordsman" and "Dangerous Years." Both theatres were designed by Cowper, Murphy and Associates and built by A. W. Edwards Pty Ltd.

The Crest seated 852 and was similar in construction to the Castle.

Mr L. Nobby Clark was the Crest's first manager and he stayed until 1956. In 1963 he was recalled to close the theatre.

A Hammond electric organ was installed in front of the stage and, for a time in its early years, Miss Ruby Coulson (well known in the Auburn area) played at picture screenings.

In the early 1960s the Crest operated only on Saturdays before screening its final programme on Saturday 24 August 1963. The theatre then reverted to its previous owner, the Roman Catholic Church. At this time the raked floor was rebuilt as a flat floor and the theatre was converted into a ballroom and used for a variety of social functions, particularly as a Bingo centre. The original projection equipment was removed when Hoyts vacated the building.

In the early 1990s the exterior was repainted and the asbestos roofing was replaced with new Colorbond roofing. The interior ceiling was repaired and the lavatories were modernised.

In the mid 1990s the five circle "Hoyts" lettering on the facade's vertical concrete triangular plane was replaced with five letters making up the word "Bingo". Otherwise the interior and exterior are mostly intact.

In more recent years the Crest has been the venue for the annual Cointreau Ball, the Annual General Meeting of the Australian Cinema & Theatre Society and was featured in Anthony Buckley's television series of Poor Man's Orange (adapted from the novel by Ruth Park). In late 2001 Bingo ceased and the cinema was then presently vacant except for occasional functions.

It was later purchased by the Australian Blouza Association, an organisation of Australian descendants from the Lebanese village of Blaouza. The organisation operates the building as a community and function centre, with the hall available for public hire. They refer to the building as Blouza Hall.

The Crest is of Quonset design with one level, vaulted ceiling auditorium, using steel frame construction and with a vestibule/amenity block running parallel to the theatre on the Redfern Street side of the block.

The exterior walls are of concrete with stucco finish. The corner entrance to the cinema has two facades at ninety degrees, which are lower than the main Blaxcell Street stepped facade. The junction of the corner facades is accented with a tapered vertical pier with an art deco motive above the facade below the tip of the pier. On either side of the pier is the name "Crest" in script style large neon lettering. Between the lower and taller Blaxcell Street facades is a large, prominent, triangular concrete pier with five protruding circles which originally contained the letters - H - O -Y - T - S. was later replaced with the letters B - I - N - G - O, and more recently replaced again with the letters B - L - O - U - Z - A.

The corner facades have a curved, cantilevered awning, which featured the word "Crest" at the corner in the same lettering style as the neon signs. A row of small light bulbs outlined the bottom edge of the awning.

Below the awning at the street frontage a display board is situated on the splayed corner below the tapered pier. A bank of six glass-paned, wooden-panelled doors is sited on either side of the splayed corner with a small maquee sign above each bank of doors. These doors open onto the tiled-floor vestibule with the box-office on the inner wall directly behind the entrance doors. There are two entrances to the main theatre, the first beside the box-office and the second at the midpoint of the theatre. Both entrances have their original deep red velvet curtains. The vestibule is painted in a light colour and around a mirror behind the splayed corner, above the doors, box-office windows and along the walls at the two metre mark is very decorative lighter coloured plasterwork in art-nouveau style. The plasterwork partially overlaps the top of the door entrances. The architrave plasterwork is simpler in style and the ceiling lighting has banks of four circular lights, each in a diamond pattern, edged with decorative plaster applique and separated by pairs of fluorescent tubes.

The original candy bar is sited on a higher level at the rear of the vestibule with two doors on the rear wall giving access to the toilets. The Crest and the Castle at Granville were the first to be permitted to use stainless steel flat back urinal stalls, the use of which the Water Board had not previously approved.