Week of 7/5-7/9 Internship blog

It has been a good week at the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation, and I hope everyone had a great Independence Day. This week the theater exhibit was fact checked by an expert on the local theaters, Irv Lipscomb. Irv corrected some things, such as the number of seats in an old theater, the Gem theater. I went back and fixed all the other errors that he pointed out. In addition to this, I have cleaned up the captions for the Winter Garden at Work exhibit and have continued my search for information about how railroad laborers were treated around the time that Florida railroads were starting to boom. This has been really difficult; I believe partly because those that wrote the histories just do not care about these people’s experiences and partly because they would be ashamed of how poorly workers were treated then. Based on the few writings I have found regarding this, the conditions of the workers seem to have been unimaginably horrific by today’s standards. 

While I have discussed the process of writing and my research methods, I have not written much on the subject matter of the exhibits in these blogs, at least of the theater exhibit. Winter Garden has had five theaters over the course of its existence. These are the “Upstairs” Theatre, Winter Garden Theatre (which later became the Garden Theatre and was re-opened in 2008), the Gem Theatre, the Annex Theatre, and the Star-Lite Drive-in. For each of these I have researched information about when they opened, closed, and other relevant information. The "Upstairs" Theatre was the first one in town, opening in the early 20th century and playing silent films. The "last" one was the Star-Lite (one of the last drive-ins in Central Florida) which closed in 1998. Winter Garden did not have a theater until the Garden Theatre re-opened ten years later. I did not want the exhibit to be just coldy stated facts so I also found stories related to each of the theaters so that there was a personal aspect that people can relate to. I found the written remembrances of a man who worked as a doorman of the Winter Garden Theatre in his youth particularly interesting. This man seemed to be a bit eccentric and wrote about how he could feel the spirit of the theater and talked to it often. I thought this tidbit was perfect because even if it is slightly unusual it shows a genuine human connection to the theater. 

I have sent out emails to get some of the copyrighted photos cleared to be used in the exhibit. I am looking forward to see what I can do to develop my work next week.

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