Duluth’s NorShor Theatre is a bit of a copyeditor’s headache. People often misspell NorShor as “NorShore” or they fail to render the S as a capital letter. And since its proper name uses the British version of “theatre” and Americans prefer “theater,” we end up with numerous ways to screw up two words.

Apparently NorShor was being spelled wrong right from the start — or “NorShore” might have even been what was planned for the original spelling before someone decided to shorten it up — because an old sketch of the building, shown above, includes an E that never made it to the building’s tower or marquee.

I don’t think I had seen this sketch until I watched Streamlined Dreams, a 1980 Twin Cities Public Television documentary about art-deco movie theaters in Minnesota that recently was uploaded to YouTube.

The video includes almost nothing about Duluth’s two art-deco theaters, but the brief flash of the “NorShore” drawing is at the 20:45 mark. There are a lot of images in the documentary, and it’s not easy to tell what theater each image represents unless it shows the marquee, so I might have missed other Duluth shots, but as near as I could tell from one casual view of the show there was just the one reference to the NorShor and zero mentions of the West Theatre.

The NorShor/NorShore image in the doc is actually shown in a shot that pans from the tower down to the marquee, so it’s not possible to grab a screenshot of the whole thing. The top of the sketch is at the top of this post, and the bottom appears below. One might need to take three screenshots to paste it all together with photo-editing software.