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A NEW FORM OF THEATER 45
Lumiere cinematograph and introduced the new amusement to Pittsburgh and adjacent communities. The interest of both men in motion pictures carried them into continued exhibition and trading in films. Harris remodeled a store-room in McKeesport, giving it a gay, brightly colored, recessed front, and in June, 1905, opened it as a moving-picture theater, offering continuous performances from eight o'clock in the morning until midnight, at Rye cents admittance. In casting about for a name Harris merged "nickel," the popular term for the five-cent piece, and "odeon," the Greek word for theater.
The Nickel-Odeon presented a screen program of about twenty minutes' duration, accompanied by piano music, and the five cents admittance drew such throngs that the theater's ninetysix seats were constantly filled; on some days a thousand patrons would pack into the back of the auditorium and stand up to see the exhibition.
Harris' idea was immediately successful. From one end of America to the other, the common man and his wife and children literally poured into store rooms suddenly converted into theaters, and everywhere Harris' selection of a name, "nickelodeon," was adopted by the public and became the general term for picture houses. *
Parlors and arcades were remodeled at moderate cost into nickelodeons by removing the peep-show cabinets and the partition across the back end of the room, and filling the entire store with kitchen chairs. If the front of the building had been taken out to make a wide-open entrance, the arcade owner now built a new front some distance back from the sidewalk line, thus making a large lobby in which posters could be displayed. The ticket booth was placed at the center of one side or the back, and when crowds besieged the theaters — as they usually did each evening— patrons could wait in the lobby or the mob could overflow to the sidewalk in the long lines that ever since then have been typical of movie theaters.
* The term "nickelette" was also extensively used.