Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/8-drive-in-theaters-still-operating-after-70-years/
Long before streaming apps and stadium seating, families packed into station wagons and pickup trucks to watch movies under the open sky. That ritual never fully disappeared. A small handful of drive-ins built during the postwar boom, and even a couple from the 1930s and 1940s, are still running projectors and selling popcorn today, decades after most of their contemporaries were bulldozed for shopping centers and warehouses.
What follows is a look at eight of these survivors, places that have quietly outlasted changing technology, shifting real estate values, and the rise and fall of the multiplex.
Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theatre, Orefield, Pennsylvania
Shankweiler’s holds a claim that no other American drive-in can match. Wilson Shankweiler, a prominent hotel owner and movie fan, opened Pennsylvania’s first drive-in on April 15, 1934, in Orefield, originally called Shankweiler’s Park-In Theatre. That made it the first drive-in theater to open in the state of Pennsylvania and the second drive-in theater to open in the entire United States.
The original setup was famously humble. When the drive-in opened, the screen was described as “a bedsheet hung between two poles.” Nearly a century later, the theater has kept adapting rather than fading away. In November 2022, new owners bought the property and resumed operations, reopening it year-round, and in April 2024 the drive-in…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-09-25 10:15:00
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