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The assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia, a reforming ruler of the Romanov dynasty, incited a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that spread through Eastern Europe and eventually drove more than 2 million people into the United States, including Kopel and Fanny Zeitz, a young Prussian couple with three small children.
ZEITERION REOPENING
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They sought a new home in Texas, then New York, and eventually settled in New Bedford, where their children defied odds and became local “movie moguls” who dined with Alfred Hitchcock and rubbed elbows with Gregory Peck, but whose demise was nearly the death knell for a once-great American city.
That is the story of the Zeitz family. At least part of it. Their reign as one of the most prominent and wealthy families in New Bedford would outlast czarist Russia. Their vaudeville theater on Purchase Street would adapt and survive the television age.
Records of the early years are thin, and the Zeitzes themselves, great marketers and storytellers as they were, fail to inject much clarity. Barney, the most enterprising of the brothers, liked to tell people he was born in “the middle of the Atlantic.”
By 1900 there was a bottling business on Morton Court, in the basement of the family’s South End home. As many as eight Zeitz kids roamed the streets, including Phillip, Barney, Frank, Harry, Morton, Fisher, Etta, and Charlie. Some served their country in the military. Most worked for the family business. They launched new ventures, including a salvage business that retrieved flotsam from the 1918 Port Hunter shipwreck.
When the 1920s started to roar, times were good. Barney wrote to his mother and siblings from Miami, worrying about his businesses and planning to jaunt to Cuba with his brothers.
The American dream had been achieved. Now it was time to take some real risks.
In September 1922, Barney Zeitz signed for a $200,000 mortgage. The family was going into the theater business. The loan would allow the family’s fledgling company, the Zeitz Realty Corp., to buy the land and buildings on Purchase Street then known as “Gasoline Alley.” The strip would be transformed into the Zeiterion Theatre, a top-notch home for entertainment, “The one thing New Bedford sorely needs,” Harry told The New Bedford Morning Mercury.
The name of this, their first theater, came from a public contest and was selected by the Zeitz brothers, who probably were flattered by the portmanteau with Criterion, the foremost of the London theaters.
Ambition churned in those early boom years, and in 1926 the brothers took on another mortgage of $80,000 to buy the former New Bedford Opera Company, which the family would convert from a stage of rarified arias into another palace of the people.
With the ink wet on these signatures, Barney slid the documents over to the presiding lawyer, who needed to verify the transaction.
On both loans, it read: “Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of John M. Bullard … A Justice of the Peace.”
Ninety-nine years and five months later, John K. Bullard, that lawyer’s grandson, picked up the phone. “I had no idea!” he bellowed with laughter into the receiver.
Bullard, the grandson, helped to save the Zeiterion Theatre in 1981, when he and longtime WHALE president Sarah Delano stopped a planned demolition and brokered a deal that gave the building to the City of New Bedford. Among other things, Bullard the grandson would become mayor, write a history of his family, and help found The New Bedford Light. He first became New-Bedford-famous for his work preserving the Zeitz name and their building in the heart of the city. Through it all, he never knew that John Bullards bookended the Zeitz saga.
On saving the theater, Bullard the grandson said, “The Zeiterion wasn’t the best theater in New Bedford; it was the last one.”
The Zeitz brothers ended up owning five of New Bedford’s 17 theaters, and theirs were the largest. In order: the Olympia, the Empire, the Zeiterion (known for most of its life as the State), the Capitol, and the New Bedford. They also owned Fall River’s Academy Theatre, Newport’s Paramount, and Portland’s Civic.
The brothers who ran these halls were ambitious and dogged. They took out hundreds of thousands (millions upon millions worth of modern dollars) in mortgages and loans. They kept razor-sharp accounting, making and recording weekly payments to multiple banks over multiple decades.
They were pennywise, too. Deep in the family archive, now housed at the Whaling Museum, Harry Zeitz scribbled a note on a $2.50 cleaning bill to his brother Morton: “Pay this bill. I have no money.”
Morton, one of the middle brothers, was the dollars and cents man. With his shirt starched and pressed, he served as treasurer of the Zeitzes’ companies. Harry was usually the manager and always the public face. When the theater first opened, a printed advertisement showed “THEATREGOERS” as a king and queen receiving their crown jewel, the “ZEITERION,” from a court servant humbled to his knees: “HARRY ZEITZ.”
Frank and Fisher rounded out the five brothers in the business who became synonymous with entertainment in New Bedford.
The theater bearing their name, the Zeiterion, was known as that for less than one year. The brothers sold ownership shares in the operating company, known as the State Theatre, while continuing to own the real estate and staying on as employees. This underlying structure mattered little to the public. Everyone knew who these grand stages belonged to.
What a time it was to own a theater. Vaudeville gave way to moving pictures. Moving pictures became talkies. Harry traveled to Boston and all the best New York hotels so that Hollywood studios could dazzle him. In those days, theater operators held the power. Production companies would show these swaggering chieftains the latest trailers, and whatever pleased men like Harry Zeitz would become what their loyal patrons saw.
And oh were the patrons loyal.
In 1942, about 60,000 attended shows every month at a Zeitz property. For tickets ranging from 10 to 50 cents, the brothers counted more than $229,000 in ticket sales; then they counted parking passes, candy and soda sales, and rental income. After all the bills were paid and salaries signed, a fat surplus of $27,474 remained — more than half a million in 2025 dollars.
In 1949, annual ticket revenue shot up to $394,155 and about 70,000 attended every month. Take-home profit exceeded $51,000 — or about $700,000 in 2025 dollars.
Soon enough the brothers became millionaires. No adjustment to modern dollars required.
But things started to change by 1960 when a junior senator from Massachusetts campaigned for the presidency. Desperate to convince voters that they should overlook his inexperience, the handsome Brookline politician made his carefully crafted electoral plea on the bright box that was then invading living rooms across the nation.
John F. Kennedy changed both politics and living rooms forever. He captivated viewers in live televised addresses and as a guest on late night variety shows. Jack “created a presidency for the Television Age,” wrote Time magazine, and his youthful visage still resides in framed pictures on the walls of Irish and Portuguese families.
While the television created Camelot, home entertainment spelled doom for the theater business. As America raced toward the moon, Americans retreated into their living rooms to watch. Cronkite beamed the news straight to them, so no one needed a theater to see pictures of the latest spark in a Cold War.
The Zeitzes’ careful books, in 1960, showed an operating deficit of nearly $7,000. Ticket revenue had fallen by half, and attendance had dropped by a factor of four.
By the dawn of the next decade, the country had largely moved on from the bustling theaters that were once their nightly entertainment. In January 1971, the Zeitzes’ lawyers asked them to compile documentation from one of their operating companies, which was deeply in debt to their real estate company. That same year the New Bedford Redevelopment Authority seized the Olympia theater, once New Bedford’s largest, to make way for “urban renewal.”
“I don’t know if it was to help build the Octopus [intersection] or the Purchase Street mall,” said Bullard the grandson, trying to recall exactly where the grand Olympia stood on today’s new street grid. But both the Olympia and the Empire, those “striking theatres,” were eventually “acquired and demolished by the Redevelopment Authority.”
“You could recognize that the downtown was being emptied out because people were going to the Dartmouth mall,” Bullard recalls of New Bedford at the time. “You also had people moving — white flight, if you want to call it that. People going to the suburbs.”
But even this changing world was not the biggest blow of 1971. A letter from the Zeitzes’ lawyers to a debt collector, one of the many sent that year:
“Your people undoubtedly know that Harry Zeitz, father of Robert Zeitz and one of the principal parties in interest in connection with the above named theatres, died recently. I. Morton Zeitz, brother of Harry Zeitz, and the undersigned are Executors of his estate.
In order to take care of the obligations incurred in the past operations of the theatres it is going to be necessary to do some refinancing and this, in turn, will involve the estate, I am proceeding with all possible haste to resolve this matter but I am certain that you can understand that this cannot be accomplished overnight.”
The death of Harry Zeitz may as well have been the death of an age in New Bedford.
Whaleships still trafficked the harbor when the Zeitzes began their theater venture. The immigrant brothers showed theatergoers their first talking picture, in 1927, one year before the great textile strikes rocked the city. Neither a Depression nor a World War could knock these brothers off their path.
Along the way, the Zeitzes were prolific philanthropists, giving scholarships and money, especially to Jewish causes. They were some of the biggest names in New Bedford when a phone number was four digits long, and their theaters remained open when the first cell phone connected to a dial tone.
Though most of New Bedford’s 17 theaters — and the Zeitzes’ five — have been knocked down, some are making a comeback. Later this week, the Zeiterion reopens. That palace of the people now belongs to them. Meanwhile the Capitol, another Zeitz property in the North End, is undergoing renovation to become a community hub, with apartments, office space, and retail.
As for the Zeitzes, some remain in the local area, but most have moved away. The Zeiterion has reached out to what family they can find while taking on the renovations.
Richard Anderson, 79, the grandson of Harry Zeitz, grew up in Fall River and returned to New Bedford for the first time in decades to tour the renovation. In a filmed interview, he told the Zeiterion, “It’s so nice to see what my uncles and grandfather built has been preserved and has become an even greater cultural force in this city.”
“We would come over here and visit my grandparents. And of course it was always a treat to come here to the theater and sit in the big leather chairs with my uncles in their offices and talk about what movies they were looking at and what movies were coming down,” Anderson said.
He remembers the parade, in 1956, when they hosted the world premiere of “Moby Dick.” He remembers how the city would rally together to stop the wrecking ball.
He became emotional thinking about those days as a boy. “I’m a little bit older now, but we had a lot of fun.”
John K. Bullard was a three-term mayor of New Bedford, head of the first federal office of sustainability at NOAA, then served as regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries in the Northeast. He is president of the New Bedford Ocean Cluster and is also a co-founder of The New Bedford Light.
Editor’s note: The New Bedford Light’s newsroom is scrupulously independent. Only the editors decide what to cover and what to publish. Founders, funders and board members have no influence over editorial content.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org.
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Excellent Most informational Always wondered real story and former Mayor Bullard’s connection
Love this article and I remember the parade for Moby Dick.