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Albany Palace Theatre

The Palace opened in October, 1931 as an RKO movie house that presented vaudeville acts between feature films. The building features an Austrian Baroque design with "Atmospheric elements." The Palace is the last survivor of a number of movie palaces that once entertained Albanites and has maintained many of its original design features.

When I was there in 2002, the house lights were still controlled by what was, for its day, a very high-tech vacuum tube light board. The lighting panel onstage controlled a large room of relays, transformers and tubes under the stage. Obsolete, unreliable and dangerous, I believe it had been replaced as part of a general renovation by the time I got back in 2006.

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