The Reality Theater, a dream rebuilt in 1948

Robertsdale's first theater belonged to the coal company. In 1918 the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company built the Liberty Theater at the corner of Main Street and Route 913, a wood-frame building the Historic American Buildings Survey measures at roughly 40 by 110 feet, with seating for 425. A local newspaper quoted in the survey remembered it as popular across the Broad Top region, showing the latest talking pictures nightly. The National Register nomination for the Robertsdale Historic District adds that the entertainment was not pure generosity; the theater was meant to keep a labor force that tended to drift. On December 11, 1936, the Liberty burned, in a fire the survey records as of undetermined origin.

The company chose not to rebuild. In 1948 it sold the lot to Gene Yanni, a former miner who had been paralyzed in a mining accident nineteen years earlier. Yanni and his brother-in-law, Thomas Cupillari, paid for a new theater that same year. It went up in concrete block with a brick-faced street front: an arched parapet with a bull's-eye window, keystones in the window surrounds, glass block details, and a wood marquee with lights. The nomination files the style as Mission. Yanni explained the name: people had thought another theater in Robertsdale only a dream, and in 1948 the dream became a reality.

It opened on December 23, 1948, and ran until August 11, 1958. It reopened in 1968 and ran again until the early 1980s.

Project historian Lola Bennett, writing in 1989, called it one of the village's architectural highlights and noted it was for sale. The 1991 county inventory of industrial sites lists it, with the stone high school beside it, as one of two later buildings important to the community. The district nomination, though the theater was then under fifty years old, counted its architectural singularity enough to make it a contributing resource, and recorded that the East Broad Top Coal Miner's Historical Society planned to renovate it as a miners' museum, theater and meeting hall.

The theater opened on December 23, 1948, and operated until August 11, 1958. The theater reopened in 1968, and operated again until the early 1980s. The building, which remains one of the village's architectural highlights, is currently for sale.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Reality Theater, written data pages, HABS PA-5557 data pages, p. 2 · character 2,186 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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