Drive-In Theaters

Bay Drive-In

About 30-odd miles away from the Black River, at the edge of the U.S.-Canadian border, the double-screen Bay Drive-In (Route 26 and Bailey Settlement Road, Alexandria Bay, 482-3874; baydrivein.com) offers a Tinseltown alternative to the touristy attractions at Alexandria Bay. Since 1982 still-boyish entrepreneur Tom Wade, 50, has been in charge of the Jefferson County operation, which first fired up its lamphouses in 1968. And there’s quite a story about the Bay’s beginnings. 

“This site was a pasture,” Wade says, “and back around 1959 or 1960 some guy bought this and was going to turn it into Alex Bay Amusements. They had the type of rides that you see at field days: the swings, roller coasters, merry-go-rounds. Well, the first night or two that they were open, somebody complained to the guy that one of the motorized swings wasn’t safe. {The owner}, a heavy-set guy, got on and told {the operator} to crank it up, and it broke and he went flying headfirst into a telephone pole and it killed him. So the place went bankrupt, it never really opened.” 

Meanwhile, the immediate A-Bay area was ozoner-less because of America’s highway system. “When Interstate 81 was built, right down by the bridge where 81 comes to it, there is a new State Troopers barracks on the right off Route 12. It used to be the Thousand Islands Drive-In,” Wade claims. “When 81 came in, through eminent domain, that drive-in closed {in 1961} and {the state} absorbed the property. You can still see the humps, the ramps that are still there, right by the cloverleaf as you’re going to Canada. 

“The {Bay Drive-In} guys that knew that the Thousand Islands Drive-In did well knew that this property was sort of in receivership, so they were able to get this property for a song, and it cost them, I think, $114,000 in 1967. This drive-in opened on June 6, 1968, which is Hollingshead Day, the day that Richard Hollingshead opened the first drive-in in 1933.” The first feature was the nunsense comedy Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, the inconsequential sequel to the superior The Trouble with Angels (1966), with Roz Russell getting back into her habit. 

Wade says that the new owners spared no expense with getting their business started. “They put up the best Selby screen, they had the best concession equipment, but at first they had a lot of drive-in competition. You had the Black River in Fort Drum, the Star-lit in Watertown, the Northside toward Clayton, the Hi-Way in Governeur, the C-Way in Ogdensburg. You had drive-ins everywhere!”

Meanwhile, the Wade family, from Ohio, spent their summers in nearby Redwood, which led to teenager Tom submitting a job application at the Bay for a projectionist trick in 1981. The Bay’s owners must have been impressed with the young man’s work ethic: “In 1982 I got a phone call from the drive-in’s co-owner and he goes, ‘Work for me and I’ll sell you the place.’ I was 20, and my parents, who were in the movie theater business in Ohio, were looking for a tax write-off. So we came and looked at it, and it was let go like a lot of drive-ins were at the time, but it was functional. So we bought the drive-in and got it for next to nothing. And shortly after we started calling it the Nuttin Works Drive-In because nothing worked! But my business started to increase because I cared more about the facility than the previous owners did. 

“In February I went to a drive-in in Lakeland, Fla., that didn’t even have basics like french fries and cheeseburgers at the concession stand, but did have cardboard pizza with sauce on it. That was the way it used to be years ago when we bought this drive-in and I had all these sins that I had to get rid of in this place because I didn’t want to operate a business like that. I thought, ‘We have to upscale this place and have people come in, and word of mouth is your best advertising. If you treat them right, give them a deal and the restrooms are clean, that’s what it’s all about, and they tell their friends.”

Wade, who spent his summers at the Bay Drive-In and the rest of the year back home in Ohio to help run the family’s bijou, the Orr in Orville, also managed to outlast the nearby competition. “By 1986 drive-ins were closing because VCRs were cutting into the business,” he recalls. “Drive-ins thrive on second features and a lot of times those co-features were already turning up on video, so nobody was staying for the intermission,” which translated into anemic concession sales—one of the essential lifelines that keep a drive-in in the black. 

“But I stuck it out,” Wade says, “and by 1988 I was the only drive-in around.” Indeed, those rivals fell like dominos within a five-year period: the Hi-Way in 1983, the Black River and the C-Way in 1987, and the Star-lit and the Northside in 1988.

Around this time Wade also made an ultimate career move-as-business decision. “I had an expensive, really nice Corvette and I said to my father, ‘I’m going to sell the car and put it into the drive-in, I want to make this more than just a summer job.’ So in 1990 I busted up all the floors and put a new foundation in the place and started landscaping things. And all of a sudden my business started going up.” 

Much like the Silver Lake’s Rick Stefanon, the ambitious Wade always seems to be embarking on another improvement to the facility, from major building projects (note the retro touches and cool neon at the snack bar) to minor tweaks regarding the evolving concession menu. In one of his first audacious moves, in 1993 Wade constructed a screening room next to the concession stand, with about 50 seats (taken from his parents’ art-deco Orr movie house) that are placed behind a screen designed to keep out the mosquitoes. The patrons had full view of the 40-by-80-foot screen, and the Bay needed every available seat because the room opened during Jurassic Park’s run.

But an outdoor theater’s physical existence will always be at the tender mercy of Mother Nature, as Wade recounts one frightening flashback: “A microburst shut us down on Saturday, July 15, 1995, at 4:35 in the morning. That night it was beastly hot and super-humid. We had no air-conditioning in the building at the time and it was, like, 88 degrees at 1:30 a.m. When I left in my Cadillac convertible I had nothing but my skivvies on, it was that hot.

“I was staying at my cottage and when the storm came through it about lifted the cottage off its piers. So I got up in the morning and I couldn’t get here at first; there were telephone poles down everywhere. So I come around from the back {of the property} and I said, “Omigod!” I couldn’t believe it. The whole top of the seating area, where I had just laid the carpeting, came off; the interior structure caved in. There were two panels left on the screen; the rest were all wrapped up around the wires. The Selby metal fence I had out front, which came from the company that made the screen, the panels on the fence came off and they sliced off the metal poles on the ground because they were going so fast through the air. 

“So I had a contractor friend of mine who came in here. I called Selby in Ohio and said, ‘Do me a deal here. What are the panels gonna cost me?’ And I got a crew and we were roofin’ and everything else, and nine days later I was back in business.”

So the screen got a face-lift, so to speak, thanks to the 1995 storm, although the tower behind it suffered no damage. “That screen was designed by Selby so that the panels are held by J-hooks that hold the panels back against the I-beams, like a gas station’s canopy, and at 125 mph per hour those Js open up and the panels can come off, and then the tower will stay. Because if you lose your tower, it’s a lot more expensive.”

Aside from the tornadic tale, Wade began a steady list of improvements to his property. “I got this idea for a twin screen, so I bought the {adjacent} property, which was a cornfield, from the same guy that originally owned this. I did the excavating and put the ramps in. Then I was trying to buy a used screen, and Selby screens are really expensive, they’re like 60 grand, and they wouldn’t do a deal with me. Well, I’m a construction guy and a welder and a fabricator-type guy, so I made my own design that was a copy of another screen in Ohio that I was gonna buy from these guys at a closed drive-in, and at the last minute they wouldn’t sell me the screen. So I designed a different screen, made the jigs and welded it together in a welding shop my friend owns, and shipped it here and put up the screen myself in 1999.” 

The rear screen measures 33-by-66 feet, with Wade having to construct a different projector booth with a 425-foot throw. The front screen is 20 feet off the ground and measures 40-by-80 feet, with a 300-foot throw from the booth. The twinning also split the customer capacity, with close to 350 cars able to squeeze in the main screen’s lot and between 175 to 200 autos fitting out back.

Wade had more ideas up his sleeve. He purchased a concession trailer adorned with carnival light bulbs from an Ohio friend and planted it near the second screen’s entrance in 2002. Now Wade can sell shaved-beef sandwich specialties, such as a marinated Teriyaki beef sandwich with provolone for $4.99. Also on the Bay’s eclectic menu: shrimp and beef egg rolls, crab and shrimp wontons, onion petals and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pints, plus the usual burgers, popcorn, nachos and soda. No wonder a raccoon was peeking out of a fence hole near the closed second stand long after the back screen’s second feature had started. The dropped goodies would make for quite the late-night snack.

Then he built additional restrooms for those rear-screen patrons in 2006, then later that fall he gutted the original drive-in bathrooms and added handicapped facilities in the back. Next came the concession stand’s remodeling project in 2008, which included the installation of automatic doors for the Howie Mandels among us (“It’s a nice touch because people don’t like to touch door handles.”) and another addition in 2009 so Wade could have two cash registers running, “because when you’re real busy, that’s the name of the game to get these people checked out.” 

And that’s not all, folks: The transition to digital means that Wade will again remodel, with plans to place the first screen’s new projector atop the concession stand’s roof as part of a second-story addition. Meanwhile, the current projection booth could morph into a café-like setting, and the screening room might even grow into a full-fledged mini-theater that could stay open year-round. The phrase “no can do” does not seem to be part of Tom Wade’s vocabulary.

Like other drive-in owners, Wade is ambivalent about the digital takeover. “In February I went to a drive-in convention in Kissimmee, Fla., and nobody really knew what was going to happen,” Wade recalls. “Everybody got letters from 20th Century Fox and {Disney distributor} Buena Vista saying they were going to stop making film in 2013 and they were really trying to get people on the bandwagon. A lot of theaters, especially the small-town indoors that don’t really gross very much and the sub-runs, are in trouble because they can’t afford it. Now I can buy a used Barco digital projector and get it set up for 30 grand, but I don’t want used equipment. With new technology you want the best that you can get. And my situation is a little different; when you have to double the price tag and when you realize you have to lay out that much cash, if you want to stay in business that’s what you gotta do. There’s no other choice. 

“So that’s what I plan on doing,” Wade declares. “Since remodeling has to be done, and it would be stupid for me to put the brand-new projector in the old booth, I’d rather get the café done, and then put the projector in a nice, air-conditioned, heated, clean, Sheetrocked, dust-free closet, and then my equipment will last longer. And my other booth on the other side, which is already heavily insulated, I can put in an air-conditioning and heating unit. But I’ll have to up my insurance {premiums} because of the cost of the new equipment. 

“The thing I don’t like about digital is that the bulbs are 1,600 bucks and they only allow you to run ’em 600 hours instead of 1,500 hours for a bulb that would cost 1,100 bucks {for a 35mm projector}. What I like about digital is that you’re never going to have a problem with a film going out of frame, you’re never going to have a focus problem, you’re never going to have a lens-change problem. You don’t need a projectionist; you can start it with a Smartphone. 

“But all of us guys, even me, and I’m one of the younger guys in the drive-in business, we all cut our teeth on film and we’re all sorry to see it go. I like to hear the click of the sprockets,” Wade says, before his voice starts to sound slightly annoyed. “It’s all about saving money on distribution. The studios don’t want to make prints anymore. That’s what it’s all about. They don’t want the independents. 

“So I might buy the equipment this year, then get the place heated, get all the stuff done and work in here from November to March, and when it clears up next spring I open big time. And it’s scary for all of us small guys because it’s a lot of money. These drive-ins are a cash business, and you ask any drive-in owners and they’ll tell you the same thing: ‘You don’t get rich at a drive-in theater.’ But you can pay the bills, serve your customers, make a decent living and be able to improve upon your business without letting it go. When somebody throws you a $150,000 curveball, however, it changes things a bit.” 

That long-ago summer job has turned into a full-time caretaker position, not that Wade is complaining, however, as he notes the recent checklist of responsibilities. “I just painted both screens last fall with high-resolution flat white acrylic paint, which will last 10 years,” he says. “And every other year I re-gravel sections with a landscape rake on a backhoe because you get ruts and potholes.”

What hasn’t changed until this season is the admission: $6 for adults, $5 for active-duty military, $4 for seniors and $2 for kids ages 7 to 11. “When I realized what it was going to cost me for the digital and the improvements that I have to make and take it out of my own pocket, I raised my admission a dollar this year,” Wade confesses. “Since 1999 it was five bucks for all these years and I was steadfastly against raising it, although some film companies wanted the admission raised years ago so they could make more money.”