Be Kind, Rewind: The Disappeared Video Rental Stores of Rockford, Illinois

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

There was a time when Friday night in Rockford, Illinois, meant going to the video store. Before Netflix, before streaming, before virtually every movie ever made seemed to be available at the push of a button, there was a ritual involved in finding something to watch. You got in your car, drove to your favorite rental store, wandered the aisles looking at movie boxes, and hoped to come home with something worth watching. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you didn't. But the trip itself was part of the entertainment.

For those of us who came of age during the 1980s and 1990s, video rental stores were as familiar a part of Rockford's commercial landscape as grocery stores, record shops, and neighborhood taverns. There were local chains, independent operators, national franchises, and even video rental counters inside supermarkets. Each had its own selection, atmosphere, and regular customers. And almost all of them have disappeared, leaving behind storefronts occupied by other businesses and memories that are becoming increasingly difficult to document.

I was attending Rockford College around 1993 when I frequented a video store near campus that I remember as Cinema Centre Video. For years I associated the store with the Morsay Drive area, although a surviving business directory lists Cinema Centre Video at 2213 East State Street, with Dennis Sharp identified as its owner. Whether the business moved, had another location, or my memory has simply rearranged the geography after three decades remains an open question.

What I remember clearly is the pleasure of looking through the horror section, hoping to find something I hadn't seen before. I was already a devoted fan of zombie movies, and finding an unfamiliar title was no small accomplishment. Every video store carried the standards: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and perhaps Lucio Fulci's Zombie. But each independent store might have one or two obscure titles that nobody else stocked. At Cinema Centre Video, I remember discovering Zombiethon, a bizarre 1986 compilation of scenes from zombie and exploitation films.

Today, finding an obscure movie takes a few seconds of searching. In 1993, it could take years. If a film wasn't available at one of your local video stores, there was a good chance you simply weren't going to see it. This made the stores more than rental businesses. They were gateways to unfamiliar worlds, and the people who stocked their shelves exercised an influence over our cultural lives that we probably didn't appreciate at the time.

Rockford's Independent Video Stores

Rockford had no shortage of places to rent movies. A 2024 retrospective published by local radio station 96.7 The Eagle recalled several businesses that longtime residents might remember, including Video Outlet, Silver Star Video, Express Discount Video, Logli Video, and Dollar Video. Each occupied its own place in the local video rental ecosystem.

Video Outlet was remembered as one of the area's larger locally operated chains, with multiple locations and a substantial selection of video games. It belonged to an era when movie rental and home video gaming were closely connected. For many families, a weekend trip to the video store meant choosing both a movie and a Nintendo or Sega game, sometimes spending more time making the selections than actually watching or playing them.

Silver Star Video, remembered near the intersection of Harlem Road and North Second Street, apparently made a particular impression on horror fans. The Eagle's retrospective recalled the store's cardboard promotional displays, including a Leatherface figure from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that startled customers as they wandered through the aisles. These displays were part of the theater of the video store. Movie posters, cardboard monsters, elaborate box art, and entire walls devoted to particular genres helped transform a commercial transaction into something resembling an expedition.

Express Discount Video operated on East Riverside Boulevard, in a location the Eagle identified in 2024 as an O'Reilly Auto Parts store. Its name reflected another important aspect of the rental business: price. Video stores competed not only on selection but also on rental rates, membership policies, specials, and the number of days customers could keep their movies. For teenagers and college students, those differences mattered.

There were also less conventional places to rent movies. Logli supermarkets offered video rentals, combining the weekly grocery trip with the opportunity to bring home a film. Dollar Video, remembered along the Route 251 corridor in Loves Park, represented the bargain end of the market. And there were undoubtedly smaller independent operations whose names have almost vanished from the internet.

Cinema Centre Video deserves a place in that history. Its surviving directory listing identifies the business at 2213 East State Street and names Dennis Sharp as owner. That isn't a complete history, but it's a beginning. Somewhere there may still be advertisements, photographs, business records, or former employees who remember its shelves, its customers, and the years it operated.

When the National Chains Arrived

Eventually, the independent stores found themselves competing with national chains such as Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Family Video. These businesses brought recognizable branding, standardized store layouts, extensive advertising, and the buying power to stock large numbers of popular new releases.

Blockbuster became one of the defining commercial institutions of the home-video era. Its blue-and-yellow signs were familiar across the country, and Rockford was no exception. Hollywood Video and Family Video also became part of the region's rental landscape. For a time, renting movies was such an established consumer habit that multiple stores could operate within relatively short distances of one another.

Family Video proved especially durable. Long after many competitors had disappeared, its stores remained familiar fixtures in northern Illinois. But even Family Video couldn't escape the changing economics of home entertainment. In September 2019, WIFR reported that the Family Video store in the 2700 block of Charles Street was closing, with the property slated to become a Dollar General. At the time, other Family Video locations in Loves Park, Belvidere, and Byron were still operating.

By January 2021, local residents were discussing the closure of the remaining Family Video stores. The industry that had once seemed permanent was reaching its conclusion.

And then there was Redbox, the automated rental kiosk that briefly seemed to offer a way for physical movie rentals to survive without maintaining an entire storefront. Redbox machines appeared outside grocery stores, pharmacies, and other retail businesses, reducing the rental experience to a small selection of discs and a credit card transaction.

Even that business model eventually failed. Redbox ceased operations in July 2024, and a May 2025 WTVO report found that its remaining kiosks had disappeared from the Rockford area.

The video rental store had gone from a neighborhood institution to a machine outside the supermarket, and finally to nothing at all.

What We Lost When the Video Stores Closed

It's tempting to explain the disappearance of video rental stores entirely in terms of technology. Streaming was more convenient, digital distribution reduced the need for physical inventory, and customers understandably preferred watching movies without leaving their homes. These changes were real, and there is no particularly convincing argument that the old rental system was more efficient.

But efficiency isn't the only measure of an experience.

Video stores offered something that modern streaming services have difficulty reproducing: the pleasure of accidental discovery. You could enter a store looking for the latest Hollywood blockbuster and leave with a low-budget horror movie, an obscure foreign film, or a documentary you'd never heard of. You might rent something because the cover looked interesting, because a friend recommended it, or because the clerk behind the counter insisted it was worth watching.

The selection was limited, but those limitations sometimes made discovery more meaningful. A store's inventory reflected the tastes of its owners, employees, distributors, and customers. No two independent stores were exactly alike. One might have an unusually good collection of martial arts films. Another might specialize in horror. Another might have an entire shelf of movies that seemed to exist nowhere else.

For horror fans in particular, video stores were an education. The VHS boom helped create audiences for obscure Italian zombie movies, low-budget American slashers, exploitation films, and countless productions that received little or no conventional theatrical distribution. Sometimes the artwork on the box was considerably better than the movie inside. Sometimes the movie was so peculiar that you remembered it for the rest of your life.

I certainly remember Zombiethon.

And I remember the larger Friday-night ritual. Buy some snacks, pick up a few beverages, rent five or six movies, and spend the weekend hoping that at least two or three were entertaining. For a college student, that was a perfectly satisfactory way to spend an evening. That and doing coursework, naturally.

There was also something social about the process. You encountered other customers, overheard conversations, argued with friends about what to rent, and occasionally received a recommendation from someone whose taste you trusted. A video store was a small public space organized around a shared interest in movies. It wasn't a grand cultural institution, but it was a place where culture circulated from one person to another.

Today, streaming services offer enormous catalogues, personalized recommendations, and immediate access to films that once required considerable effort to locate. There are obvious advantages to that. I wouldn't trade the ability to find an obscure movie in seconds for the necessity of searching half a dozen stores.

But I do miss the search itself.

Remembering Rockford's Lost Video Stores

The disappearance of Rockford's video rental stores is part of a much larger story about the changing American commercial landscape. Record shops, independent bookstores, neighborhood theaters, and video stores once occupied physical spaces where people encountered culture together. Some survived by adapting. Others disappeared almost completely.

What interests me is how quickly the physical evidence vanishes. A store that thousands of people visited over the course of a decade can become almost impossible to research thirty years later. The building remains, perhaps, but the sign is gone, the business directories are discarded, and the people who worked there have moved on.

That's one reason I wanted to write this article.

I would love to hear from Rockford residents who remember Cinema Centre Video, Video Outlet, Silver Star Video, Express Discount Video, Dollar Video, or any of the smaller stores that operated around the city. Where were they located? Who owned them? Which had the best horror section? Did you work at one? Do you have photographs, advertisements, membership cards, or even an old VHS rental case with the store's sticker still attached?

And if someone can tell me whether Cinema Centre Video operated near Rockford College around 1993, I'd especially appreciate solving that little mystery.

Because somewhere in Rockford, thirty-three years ago, I walked into a video store on a Friday night looking for something I hadn't seen before. I came home with a movie called Zombiethon, some snacks, and the expectation of an entertaining weekend.

I didn't realize I was participating in a cultural ritual that would eventually disappear.

I was just looking for a good zombie movie.

And I had to remember to rewind it.

Remembering North Main Tavern: A Lost Rockford Neighborhood Landmark

 There was a time when the intersection of North Main and Auburn Streets in Rockford looked considerably different than it does today. Before the landscaped roundabout, before Veterans Memorial Circle, and before the reconstruction that transformed the North End, there was North Main Tavern.

For generations, it was one of those neighborhood establishments that seemed as permanent as the street itself. Its weathered exterior and distinctive roadside sign belonged to an older Rockford, when taverns were not simply places to buy a drink but fixtures of neighborhood life.

North Main Tavern opened in 1934, according to the roadside architecture archive RoadsideArchitecture.com. Its vintage sign, photographed in 2012, may have dated to the original establishment. By then, the tavern had survived nearly eight decades of changes to the city around it.

A Tavern at the Crossroads

The tavern occupied a particularly recognizable piece of Rockford geography, near the intersection of North Main and Auburn Streets. Greenwood Cemetery stood nearby, as did the residential streets of Churchill's Grove and the commercial establishments that gave the North End its distinctive neighborhood character.

North Main Street had long served as an important commercial corridor, connecting residential neighborhoods with downtown Rockford. Its collection of taverns, restaurants, shops, and older commercial buildings reflected the gradual development of the city's west side.

North Main Tavern belonged to that landscape. It was not an architectural monument or a grand civic institution. It was something more ordinary, and perhaps for that reason more deeply embedded in the memories of people who lived nearby.

The End of an Era

By the late 2000s, Rockford was planning a substantial reconstruction of the North Main and Auburn intersection. The city's Envision North Main Street planning document recommended a roundabout as part of a broader effort to improve traffic flow and strengthen the surrounding commercial district.

The project required changes to the existing streetscape, including the removal of several older structures.

North Main Tavern was among the casualties.

In 2013, the tavern announced that it would relocate because its longtime building was being demolished to accommodate the new two-lane roundabout. Its familiar sign disappeared along with the building. The establishment's disappearance marked the end of nearly 80 years at the intersection.

The reconstructed intersection was dedicated on November 8, 2013, as Veterans Memorial Circle. Its memorial recognizes the area's military history, particularly the hundreds of veterans buried in nearby Greenwood Cemetery.

The project gave the intersection a new identity, but it also erased part of the physical landscape that longtime Rockford residents remembered.

What Happened to North Main Tavern?

The original tavern should not be confused with the later North Main Bar at 1428 North Main Street.

That location had previously housed another longtime neighborhood establishment, The Barn. North Main Bar subsequently operated there for approximately seven years before closing in early 2022.

In February 2024, the building reopened as The GOAT Pub and Grill following an extensive renovation by owner Tom McDonald. The property itself dates to 1935 and retains elements of its earlier tavern history, including its ornate back bar.

Although these establishments share a connection to the North End's tavern tradition, the building at 1428 North Main is not the surviving original North Main Tavern.

The Places We Remember

Cities are continually replacing themselves. Streets are widened, intersections redesigned, buildings demolished, and new businesses take the places of old ones.

Sometimes the improvements are substantial. Sometimes the losses are difficult to measure.

North Main Tavern was never likely to appear on a list of Rockford's great architectural treasures. But places like it are important to a city's history precisely because they were ordinary. They were the places where people stopped after work, recognized familiar faces, exchanged neighborhood news, and accumulated the small experiences that eventually become local history.

Today, thousands of motorists travel through Veterans Memorial Circle without necessarily knowing what once occupied the surrounding ground.

But for longtime Rockford residents, North Main Tavern remains part of the landscape, even if it can no longer be seen.

Some buildings disappear from the street long before they disappear from memory.

 

Whatever Happened to the Palace Shoe Service Neon Sign in Rockford?

For decades, a cobbler stood over North Main Street in downtown Rockford, hammering away at the same shoe. People who spent time downtown will remember the enormous Palace Shoe Service sign, the kind of elaborate commercial sign cities used to have before illuminated plastic rectangles became the preferred method of announcing that something was for sale.

The shoemaker on the sign wasn't always standing still. When everything was working properly, his arm moved through a three-part hammering animation. When the hammer came down on the shoe, two red neon sparks flashed at the point of impact. Then he raised the hammer and did it all over again. It was advertising, public art and mechanical theater rolled into one wonderfully unnecessary object.

And now it's gone.

Palace Shoe Service Goes Back to 1926

Palace Shoe Service was one of those increasingly rare Rockford businesses whose history could be measured in generations rather than years. Brothers Joseph and Jasper Giamalva opened the business in downtown Rockford in 1926. According to a history published by the Rockford Historical Society, the brothers had learned shoemaking in Sicily before eventually settling in Rockford.

Their first shop was on the east side of the 100 block of North Main Street. The Palace name wasn't an attempt to make shoe repair sound particularly luxurious. There really was a Palace nearby: the Palace Theatre. Four years after opening, the brothers moved across North Main Street to a location between the Orpheum Theatre and Simon Drug Store.

Downtown Rockford was a very different animal then. One Easter Eve Saturday during the 1930s, Palace reportedly shined 500 pairs of shoes in a single day, at ten cents a shine. Eventually Palace Shoe Service settled at 204 North Main Street, where generations of Rockford residents would know it.

Then Came the Cobbler

The famous Palace Shoe Service sign was built in 1950. It was approximately eight feet wide, and according to roadside-sign historian Debra Jane Seltzer, the shoemaker depicted on it was modeled after John Antunicci, who owned the business at the time.

The animation was what made the thing extraordinary. The cobbler raised his arm, brought the hammer down and two red neon sparks flashed where the hammer met the shoe. Then the sequence repeated. It must have been quite a sight when the neon and animation were completely functional, especially at night on a North Main Street filled with other illuminated theater and business signs.

The sign survived long after elaborate animated neon signs like it stopped being made. It even survived a move from an earlier Palace Shoe Service location to the later shop. By the 2000s and 2010s, it had become less an advertisement than a piece of Rockford folk art. Photographers noticed it. Travelers interested in old roadside America noticed it. Rockford residents certainly noticed it.

Restoring the sign, unfortunately, wasn't cheap. The business reportedly received estimates of $15,000 to $20,000 to bring it back to its former glory. For a family shoe-repair business, that was an enormous expense, so the old cobbler remained above North Main Street without being completely restored.

Ninety-Five Years in Downtown Rockford

Palace Shoe Service survived nearly everything downtown Rockford could throw at it. It survived the Depression, World War II, the decline of the traditional downtown shopping district, shopping malls and an era of inexpensive shoes increasingly designed to be thrown away rather than repaired. It even survived the Palace Theatre that had given the business its name. The theater was demolished in 1984.

Palace remained associated with the Giamalva family through four generations. In 2021, the Greater Rockford Italian American Association recognized the family and the remarkable longevity of Palace Shoe Service. By then, however, one of downtown Rockford's longest-running businesses was nearing the end of its story. After roughly 95 years, Palace Shoe Service closed.

Sometime afterward, the cobbler disappeared too.

RoadsideArchitecture.com, which documented the Palace sign over the years, records the business as closed and shows that by 2023 the famous sign was no longer there. That leaves a question that turns this from another piece of Rockford history into a Rockford mystery.

Where Is the Palace Shoe Service Sign?

An eight-foot-wide animated neon sign built in 1950 doesn't exactly disappear into someone's coat pocket. Somebody removed it from the building, but what happened after that?

Was it scrapped? Was it sold? Did a collector acquire it? Did someone connected with Palace Shoe Service save it? Is it hanging inside another building? Or is Rockford's hammering cobbler sitting quietly in a garage, warehouse or barn somewhere, waiting for somebody to remember him?

So far, I haven't found a reliable public source that answers that question. There is, however, reason to hope that "gone" doesn't necessarily mean destroyed.

Rockford has lost other spectacular old signs from its streets without necessarily losing the signs themselves. The signs at Parthenios Luncheonette at 132 North Church Street survived after the restaurant closed in 2010. Those signs had originally belonged to Hobson Drug Company and may have dated to the 1940s or earlier. One of the vertical signs once alternated between FOOD and DRUGS in neon. The signs were eventually removed in 2017, sold at auction and reportedly entered a private collection.

The old Der Rathskeller sign also survived the closing of the restaurant it advertised and was eventually sold to a private collector. Somewhere, pieces of the Rockford streetscape that many people assume vanished forever are apparently still out there.

Maybe the Palace cobbler is one of them.

Help Us Solve a Rockford Mystery

This is where Rockford Blog readers come in. If you know what happened to the Palace Shoe Service sign after the business closed, we'd like to hear about it. Maybe you knew the Giamalva family, worked downtown, saw the sign being removed or heard that somebody bought it. Maybe you've actually seen it since it disappeared from North Main Street.

And if you have old photographs of the Palace Shoe Service sign when the neon and animation were still working, those are part of this story too. There must be photographs scattered through Rockford family albums showing North Main Street when the cobbler was still hammering away above the sidewalk.

For more than seventy years, he stood above Rockford working on the same shoe. That's long enough to earn an ending to the story.

So, Rockford: whatever happened to the Palace Shoe Service cobbler?

 

The Lost Movie Theaters of Rockford, Illinois

When we think about Rockford's old movie theaters, three names tend to dominate the conversation: the Coronado Theatre, the Midway Theatre, and the Times Theatre.

There is a pretty good reason for that.

They're still here.

The Coronado remains one of Rockford's great architectural treasures. The Midway still stands on East State Street, its tower and marquee surviving despite decades of uncertainty. And the Times Theatre on North Main Street has been the subject of a long-running restoration effort.

But these weren't the only places Rockford residents went to the movies.

Not even close.

For much of the twentieth century, Rockford had a surprisingly large collection of movie houses scattered around downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. Most have disappeared so completely that it's difficult today to imagine a time when going to the movies in Rockford didn't mean driving out to a multiplex.

The Midway Theatre

The Midway is the oldest of Rockford's three most recognizable surviving movie houses.

It opened on August 3, 1918, at 721 East State Street. Architect J.E.O. Pridmore designed the Spanish Renaissance-style building, which included much more than a movie theater. The complex also contained storefronts, apartments and even a bowling alley in the basement.

The Midway was reportedly the largest theater in Illinois outside Chicago when it opened.

Its location also explains its name. At the time it was built, the theater stood roughly midway between Rockford's city limits.

For generations of Rockford residents, the Midway was simply part of the landscape of East State Street.

A devastating fire gutted much of the building in 1980, although the distinctive façade, marquee and tower survived. The building was restored and later became home to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra before the orchestra moved to the Coronado.

Today the Midway remains one of those Rockford buildings almost everyone recognizes, even if fewer and fewer people remember actually seeing a movie there.

The Coronado Theatre

If the Midway was impressive, the Coronado Theatre was designed to overwhelm you.

The Coronado opened on October 9, 1927, at 314 North Main Street. It cost approximately $1.5 million to build and seated about 2,400 people.

It wasn't merely a room containing a movie screen.

The Coronado was an atmospheric theater, designed to make audiences feel as though they had entered another world. Spanish castles, Italian villas, dragons and a ceiling resembling a star-filled night sky surrounded moviegoers. There was even a massive Barton pipe organ.

It quickly became known as "Rockford's Wonder Theatre."

Movies were only part of the attraction. Over the decades the Coronado hosted performers including Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., the Marx Brothers and George Gershwin.

Unlike so many of America's great movie palaces, the Coronado survived.

After an enormous community restoration effort around the turn of the twenty-first century, it emerged as the Coronado Performing Arts Center and remains one of the most spectacular buildings in Rockford.

The Times Theatre

The Times came slightly later.

Located at 226 North Main Street, the Times Theatre opened on March 30, 1938, with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Thoroughbreds Don't Cry.

Architecturally, it belonged to a different generation than the elaborate Coronado. The Times embraced the sleek curves and horizontal lines of Streamline Moderne, giving downtown Rockford a thoroughly modern movie theater for the late 1930s.

The theater had roughly 1,000 seats and remained a movie house for decades.

Its final film was The Entity, starring Barbara Hershey, when the Times closed in February 1983.

The building later became a restaurant, nightclub and entertainment venue before sitting vacant for years. More recently, preservation efforts have attempted to bring the Times back to life as an entertainment venue.

But even these three theaters tell only part of the story.

The State Theatre

One of the most significant Rockford theaters to disappear completely was the State Theatre at 105 West State Street.

Its history actually began as the Palm Theatre, which opened in 1913. After remodeling and a period of closure, it reopened as the State Theatre in September 1931.

The State wasn't trying to compete with the Coronado by being another gigantic fantasy palace. Its business model included showing major movies on their second runs at affordable prices.

Its slogan said it nicely:

"Good Shows at Reasonable Prices."

The State survived the Depression, World War II and the arrival of television, but it didn't survive downtown redevelopment.

It closed in September 1976 and was demolished later that year. The Luther Center apartment building eventually occupied the site.

Today there is virtually nothing there to suggest generations of Rockford residents once lined up at that location to see movies.

The Capitol Theatre

The Capitol Theatre, at 1122 South Main Street, was another substantial Rockford movie house.

Built in 1928 by Anthony Domino and Theodore Ingrassia, the approximately 1,000-seat Capitol was designed by Rockford architect Wybe J. van der Meer.

Like the Coronado, the Capitol was an atmospheric theater, although on a smaller scale. Its auditorium had a Spanish garden theme and a ceiling where artificial stars twinkled overhead. The building's Spanish Colonial exterior included a red tile roof and terra-cotta medallions depicting famous cultural figures.

The Capitol showed movies, hosted vaudeville performers and later became a venue for live music. Performers associated with the theater included Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

Eventually the movies stopped. The building subsequently served other purposes, including a billiard hall and restaurant, before falling vacant and deteriorating.

The auditorium was finally demolished in December 2025, although the historic South Main Street façade remained standing.

For nearly a century, however, the Capitol was another reminder that Rockford's movie theater history extended well beyond downtown.

And There Were More

This is where Rockford's theater history becomes wonderfully murky.

Old theater directories and historical records contain a remarkable collection of additional Rockford movie-house names: the Rex Theatre, Royal Theatre, Strand, Roxy, Auburn Theatre, Capri Theatre, Crest Theatre, Dreamland Theatre, Liberty Theatre, Lyric Theatre, Majestic Theater, Orpheum Theatre and Palace Theatre, among others.

Some of these names represented the same building at different times. Some operated relatively briefly. For others, fragments of information survive but not enough to reconstruct their stories without considerably more digging through old newspapers, city directories and theater-industry publications.

There were also later neighborhood and shopping-center theaters, including the Colonial Village Cinema, North Towne Cinemas and Northridge theaters, followed by the multiplex era familiar to more recent generations.

And Rockford had drive-ins, including the Belford, Robin and Sunset, which deserve their own place in the city's moviegoing memory.

The point isn't really to compile every theater that ever projected a movie in Rockford.

It's to remember how thoroughly movies were once woven into the physical fabric of the city.

People didn't necessarily travel across town to a giant complex containing twelve or twenty screens. There were theaters downtown. There were theaters in neighborhoods. There were grand movie palaces and modest second-run houses. There were places where you could spend an afternoon watching cartoons and places where simply walking through the lobby must have felt like entering another country.

Most of them disappeared.

The State is gone. The Capitol auditorium is gone. Many of the smaller theaters disappeared so thoroughly that their names now sound almost imaginary.

Dreamland. The Palace. The Majestic. The Lyric.

But the Coronado survived.

The Midway survived.

The Times survived.

And if you stand in front of any one of them long enough, it's worth remembering that these buildings aren't the remnants of three unusual theaters Rockford happened to have.

They're the survivors of an entire moviegoing city that has mostly vanished.