The Glassboro Theatre

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This is a photograph of The Glassboro, a movie theater that originally opened under the name "The Delsea." The structure was located on the corner of High Street and South Academy Street at the coordinates 39.701966, -75.109523. 

The Delsea opened in June 1927, featuring "talkies," the first movies with sound. During that time, gangster films and musicals were especially popular. A short time later, the theater also occasionally showed color movies, though black and white remained the standard for several years. Due to the new theater and its new technology, the first theater in town, The Palace, was forced to close. (See The Palace Theater)

Over the years, the theater's name changed from The Delsea to The Glassboro to The Roxy. In the 1960s and 1970s, downtown Glassboro's shopping traffic diminished due to changing consumer behaviors, the building of new shopping centers and malls, and the downturn of the economy. In the 1970s, the movie theater was used for a short time to screen adult films.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the boxer Tony "The Punching Postman" Thorton used the theater as a boxing gym. Mr. Thorton worked full-time as a postman while also training and competing as a professional middle-weight boxer. Mr. Thorton was a top-ranked fighter and fought three times for the super middleweight championship title.

The theater was then used as a church for a couple of years, and then it sat vacant till 2013, when the building was demolished due to many years of neglect. The site is now occasionally used for community activities, including public space activation by Rowan University Geography students. 

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