The
Paramount Theatre in Seattle, Washington is a 2,807-seat
performing arts venue at 9th Avenue and Pine Street in Downtown Seattle
in the United States of America. The theater originally opened March 1,
1928 as the
Seattle Theatre with 3,000 seats. It was placed on
the National Register of Historic Places on October 9, 1974. It is also
an official City of Seattle landmark. The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
was also known as Paramount Theater.
The theatre was designed by the
Chicago-based firm of Rapp & Rapp, with Seattle architect B. Marcus
Priteca collaborating. It was renamed the Paramount in the 1940s.
The Paramount was built expressly for showing film and secondarily,
vaudeville. As of 2009, the Paramount is currently operated as a
performing arts venue, serving a diverse patron base that attends
Broadway theatre, concerts, dance, comedy, family engagements, silent
film and jazz. It is considered to be one of the busiest theatres in the
region.
It is currently owned and operated by the Seattle Theatre Group, a
501(c)(3) not-for-profit performing arts organization, which also runs
the 1,419-seat Moore Theatre in Belltown.
During the “Roaring Twenties,” particularly before the first
“talkies” were invented in 1927, vaudeville and silent movies were the
dominant form of national and local entertainment. Seattle alone had
more than 50 movie palaces, the finest grouped together on 2nd Avenue.
To achieve the broadest possible distribution of its films,
Hollywood-based Paramount Pictures constructed a grand movie palace in
practically every major city in the country, many erected between 1926
and 1928. In late 1926 or early 1927, Paramount Pictures decided to
build in Seattle.
Led by its president, Hungarian-born movie magnate Adolph Zukor,
Paramount Pictures invested the nearly $3 million required for
construction. It hired Cornelius W. and George L. Rapp, brothers who
owned a Chicago-based architectural firm that built theatres around the
country, to design the theatre building. Scottish-born Seattle resident
Benjamin Marcus “Uncle Benny” Priteca, America’s most celebrated
architect of movie palaces in the 1920s, designed the building’s
adjacent apartments and office suites.
The Rapp brothers began with a substantial handicap: the land for the
new theatre was situated on 9th Avenue, blocks from the center of
Seattle’s theatre district, and the land was no more than a ravine with
a creek flowing to nearby Lake Union. After filling in the land,
Paramount Pictures compensated for its new theatre’s remote location by
building the largest, most spectacular, most opulent movie palace
Seattle had ever seen. On March 1, 1928, the Seattle Theatre opened. The
Seattle Times heralded the occasion with enthusiasm:
Never has such a magnificent cathedral of entertainment been
given over to the public. Indescribable beauty! Incomparable art!
The stage productions will be of the most lavish design, brilliant
in their lighting effects and gorgeous in their settings.
ALL SEATTLE WILL BE THERE! Show divine at 9th and Pine … an acre
of seats in a palace of splendor. It’s yours . . . you’ll love it .
. . Everybody’s welcome, everybody’s wanted . . . Every
Washingtonian will be proud of its stately magnificence, its
gorgeous decorations, its spacious foyers, its wide aisles, its
commodious seats, its symphony of lights. See the Mammoth Show! In
all the World no place like this!
Eager customers responded on opening night, lining up eight abreast
outside The Seattle. After paying the 50 cent admission fee, they
entered the grand lobby. There patrons encountered a lavish interior
decorated in the Beaux Arts (also called French Renaissance) style of
the palace in Versailles. They were awed by the four-tiered lobby,
French baroque plaster moldings, gold-leaf encrusted wall medallions,
rich paint colors, beaded chandeliers, and lacy ironwork. Their feet
sank into hand-loomed French carpeting as they walked past walls adorned
with delicate tapestries and original paintings in gilded frames. Heavy,
expensive draperies fell at the windows, and hand-carved furniture
upholstered in the finest fabrics lined the first-floor lobby.
Before entering the auditorium, customers were entertained by the
rare gold and ivory Knabe Ampico grand player piano in the lounge area
just above the foyer.
Patrons were escorted to their places in the nearly 4,000 seat
auditorium by what the program booklet praised as an “alert, tactful,
well trained” corps of ushers who provided “courteous, unostentatious
service.” The program promised “no fuss, no senseless genuflections, but
. . . welcome, quiet, considerate and alert attention on the part of
each of these ushers — in other words, a gracious host making you feel
that his home is yours, suavely, expeditiously, sincerely and without
affect
The Paramount Theatre is also the first venue in the United States to
have a convertible floor system, which converts the theater to a
ballroom.
As of 2009, the Paramount has a new sign out front. The 1940s
Paramount sign originally used 1,970 incandescent bulbs, which were
eventually replaced by 11-watt fluorescents. The new sign is a replica
of that iconic sign, but uses LED lights