Quote Originally Posted by 56packman View Post
We never claimed that the Redford seated 2000, the original capacity was in the neighborhood of 2000, adjusted for 1920s ballywhoo. When we took the building over the seating was at 1495, the projectionist union made a rule in the 1950s that if you had over 1500 seats you had to have two union men in the booth on weekends. The Goldberg Brothers [[Community theatres) fixed that by having enough seats removed so that the count was 1495. We added those seats back in 1980 when the Toledo library gutted their auditorium from their main branch, we transported those seats and installed them on the bare "steps". The count is 1571 after our $270,000 partial re-seating done in 2003. The original seats were much narrower and crammed together, the seats we removed and scrapped in 2003 were from the 1950 re-seating, also when the current marquee was added.
56packman... thanks for that interesting info... I wonder if this have happened at the United Artists.... original seating 2070... later reconfigured to 2012... and much later it went down to 1488. Sounds like they wanted to get under the 1500 limit as well....