San Carlino Theater

853–857 Grand Avenue (former)

San Carlino Theater c. 1915E exterior. Photo courtesy Colin M. Caplan and Anthony Riccio.

Opened in 1909, the San Carlino seated over 500 patrons and had a full orchestra pit for live musical performances. It was owned and operated by Richard T. Halliwell, who also owned smaller theaters in Meriden and Ansonia, offering vaudeville and other low-cost entertainment to working-class, often immigrant audiences. An unusual feature was the all-female house orchestra.

The San Carlino was ill-suited to the new era of “talking movies” and disappeared after 1927. Another theater, the Apollo, occupied the site until the 1940s when it was replaced by the Dreamland Theatre a block away as Grand Avenue’s major entertainment venue. The distinctive three-story building that housed the San Carlino has survived and is now occupied by a church (Manantial De Vida).

Italian-American operatic soprano Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981), née Rosa Ponzillo in Meriden, gave some of her first performances at the San Carlino around 1914, when she was still a teenager. She recalled having to rehearse and perform two sets of songs: one in English for “Yale boys” who trekked a mile from campus, and another set of traditional Neapolitan songs for Italian-speaking immigrant “townies.” James Ceriani, Italian-born proprietor of New Haven’s popular downtown club Café Mellone, discovered Ponselle at the San Carlino and brought her to the attention of famous Italian tenor Enrico Caruso; by age 21 she was performing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Ponselle went on to a long and distinguished international career, but always remembered the San Carlino fondly in interviews late in her life.

From 1964–1995, the former theater became a furniture business operated by the Glick family. The Glick brothers, Barney and Morris, were Jews that immigrated from Lithuania in the 1900s.

Text sources: Cinema Treasures Website Link; Drake, James, Amadeus Press, 1997; Riccio, Anthony. The Italian American Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories, SUNY Press, 2006; Cannelli, Antonio, La Colonia Italiana di New Haven, Connecticut, (Stabilimento Tipgrafico A. Cannelli Co.), 1921.