I have a photo of it somewhere on my hard drive. The painted banner above the doors says,"Dream Land".

I have no idea what the proprietor was purveying. It could have been the machine that flipped photos mounted on heavy card stock so that they appeared to be moving. Those things had been around for a couple decades by then. I know my hometown. It could have been that backward then. It is now. It could have been a sixteen millimeter film loop played in box. It could have even had an Edison cylinder playing along with it. Or it could have been a full-blown theatre experience, with a player piano trotting through a roll of Scott Joplin while a rickety projector ran a full reel of nitrate stock past a light bulb to cover an almost white sheet nailed to the brick wall with moving images.

I'm still looking for the photo amongst my picture files, but if I remember correctly, the price was 25 cents. That was a lot of money for a few moments diversion back then. People would have been lucky to be making a dollar a day. Five dollars would feed a family for a month if judiciously applied.

What would they get for their quarter? Any manner of series of images was available by then. The Lumiere brothers and Edison, amongst others, had been wasting film on all kinds images, ideas and subjects. There was dancing, acrobatics, military drill, kissing, and a couple other human activities involving clothes or none. In the realm of fantasy, several popular literary concepts had been dramatized and many of the popular comics characters suddenly found themselves animated.

Nowadays nobody outside of a two year old or a historian would find these movies terribly interesting. They are in sepia tones or have been hand-tinted and there is no sound. The lighting is primitive so the exposures ranged from very contrasty to almost impossible to see. The cameras were hand-cranked at varying speeds so the action is jerky, often made more so by the fact that frames are usually missing. When the film snagged or broke, they just clipped away what they had to and then taped or glued the ends together. We have no negatives to print new copies of old films from in many cases. If every foot of film that has been exposed in the last century had been preserved, it would fill the French Channel.