Rialto Ballroom

[jasper]

The Rialto in Upper Parliament Street was a popular venue for ballroom dancing. If you wanted to dance on Sunday you had to join the Sunday Club.

Monday night was dancer's night and all the dance teachers and competiion dancers used to go there for practice.

There must have been a fairly strict dress code because all the men wore their lounge suits and the ladies looked resplendent in their evening gowns. A new manager came in about 1960 and the Rialto started to go down hill with riff raff being allowed in.

[lindylou]

My grandmother told me about it. She loved ballroom dancing and she used to go there. She said the people would be dressed up so smart.

[Maggie May]

I also like ballroom dancing but dont get to do it much any more...I sometimes wish it was still like the 'old days' when people got dressed up to go out...ladies in lovely ball gowns and the men all dapper in their evening dress....:)

[taffy]

The Rialto in Upper Parliament Street was a popular venue for ballroom dancing. If you wanted to dance on Sunday you had to join the Sunday Club.



Here's a photo of the old Rialto before it was torched in the 1981 riots

http://toxteth.net/places/liverpool/general/upper%20parliament%20street.htm

[squiggs]

My claim to fame ! is that I was on the 80 bus the night the riots broke out (the police stopped the bus and told us to get down on the floor) and the driver put his foot down and races past the Rialto, so I must have been one of the last people to see the building intact !.

[lindylou]

Friends of mine who lived in Sunnyside, Devonshire rd, had gone abroad on holiday for 2 weeks - had heard no local news at all - on returning home, got the shock of their lives to see Lodge lane smouldering and half gone !! :shock:

[Dave H]

It was a strange day. Quiet. The sort of quiet you get when everyone holds their breath. Liverpool 8 after the fighting and before the Garden Festival. Picking up the pieces. Smelling of damp smoke and adrenalin.

Walking down Princes Avenue, police pairs on every corner. Fresh faces drafted into a conflict they didn’t understand. Hanging around in the urban decay, quietly chatting about sheep on the fells and frightening old ladies with their aggressive politeness.

Down past gutted shops. Temporary boarding that would become permanent sticky-plastering the gaping wounds of the multi-cultural shopping. Down past where my parents lived. Past the railings that broke a young back hit by an attack jeep.

Crossing the line of battle, still scarred and littered, to Rialto corner. A shell long before it burned, storing second-hand furniture, but still a Gibraltar Rock in our landscape. Generations of local kids welcomed to Saturday matinees in the fantasy palace by dinner-suited and bow-tied managers. Gone now.

Down the hill, past the streets of my childhood, named after slave traders and unlucky Victorian politicians. Down towards Hardman Street police station, now housing suspect troops, withdrawn to barracks.

And, in the road, a young duck. Surprised at first, we try to capture it. The duck does not fly but shows an ability to dodge and weave worthy of George Best. Regroup. We form a line and organise a snatch squad. While some of us ‘beat our shields’, others rush forward to capture the youngster in a thrown coat.

We take it into the police station, resisting a common urge to shout “Duck!”, and deposit with the desk sergeant. Solid, stoic and humourless, the sergeant fills in a lost property form and escorts the duck away to the cells.

Further down the hill we emerge from the war zone. Life going on as it had. Survivors.

[jasper]

I no longer live in Liverpool.

All those people with their meaningless battle scars from a few days racial violence fail to impress me.

The loss of the Rialto as a dance venue represents the destruction of a culture and a way or life that gave a kind of dignity and glamour to those of us who knew it and went there.

[PhilipG]

The dance hall wasn't lost because of the Riots.
Surely it had closed years before.
It became a bingo hall, but even that had closed well before the Riots.
The Rialto was one of the rare cinemas in Merseyside to have a dance hall attached.
There was the Capitol in Liscard, and the Plaza in Ainsdale, and I think that was the lot.
There was the Odeon in London Road which had Victor Sylvester (remember him?) dancing lessons (or something) but that was in part of the cinema building (the cafe?).

[brian daley]

What a fantastic bit of writing from Dave H. I sat enthralled as the sheer prose poetry revealed the bleakness of that time. Write on you wordsmith,you have something real to say,
BrianD

[Dave H]

Thanks Brian - too kind. The duck story is true and just seemed to add to the unreality.

When the riots happened, the Rialto was just a shell of its former self. It had spent time as a bingo hall then closed. It was gutted by Swainbanks and was being used as a warehouse for second-hand furniture.

I was never dancing there. I know that they had Twist competitions as well as ballroom dancing. As a child, I was a member of the famous Saturday Club and went to matinees. They used to send cards for your birthdays. In contrast to some other cinemas (Granby for example was a flea-pit) the Rialto was always smart and gleaming and the manager would dress up to greet the clientele (us scruffs) in the foyer. It seemed like a palace and was well respected locally.

[PhilipG]

Thanks Brian - too kind. The duck story is true and just seemed to add to the unreality.

When the riots happened, the Rialto was just a shell of its former self. It had spent time as a bingo hall then closed. It was gutted by Swainbanks and was being used as a warehouse for second-hand furniture.

I was never dancing there. I know that they had Twist competitions as well as ballroom dancing. As a child, I was a member of the famous Saturday Club and went to matinees. They used to send cards for your birthdays. In contrast to some other cinemas (Granby for example was a flea-pit) the Rialto was always smart and gleaming and the manager would dress up to greet the clientele (us scruffs) in the foyer. It seemed like a palace and was well respected locally.

Swainbanks were in the cinema part.
The furniture on the stage was for export (the best pieces) to the USA.
The stepped seating area was still there and that was full of furniture that we residents could buy.
It was so surreal.
A wooden audience watching a wooden cast!
If only I'd taken a photo!

It's interesting that you call the Granby by that name.
Officially it had been the Prince's since 1932, but it had been the Granby before that, and the Granby Hall before it was converted into a cinema in 1912.

[Ged]

A wooden audience watching a wooden cast.

Very descriptive. It could also go for any big brother fans out there ;)


:PDT_Xtremez_42::034::PDT_Xtremez_12: :ninja:

[Dave H]

It's interesting that you call the Granby by that name.
Officially it had been the Prince's since 1932, but it had been the Granby before that, and the Granby Hall before it was converted into a cinema in 1912.[/QUOTE]

I never thought about it - I think I just called it what others did. I suppose it shows the persistence of group labels. (Another example would be the Egerton Street 'Grapes' being known as 'Peter Kavanagh's' until it was called 'Peter Kavanagh's' and was known as 'The Grapes'.)

The Granby cinema was awful. The stuffing was out of a lot of the seats. You couldn't hear the picture for the crowd noises. There were also columns supporting the balcony and if you got stuck in a seat behind them you could see nothing.

[knowhowe]

Does anyone have any pictures of the Rialto in its heyday? I've never seen any. I only remember it as Swainbank's (where we bought odd bits of furniture when we were starting out) - and as the gutted wreck, of course.

Don't know if it's true, but there was a tale at the time that they wouldn't serve black people at Swainbank's, hence it being targeted.

The idea of that sad place once being filled by elegantly-dressed people dancing to a real orchestra fills me with wonder...