Paramount Theatre (Seattle, Washington)
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Paramount Theatre
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Paramount Theatre in Seattle
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| Location | 901 Pine St. Seattle, Washington |
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| Coordinates | 47°36′47″N 122°19′53″W / 47.61306°N 122.33139°WCoordinates: 47°36′47″N 122°19′53″W / 47.61306°N 122.33139°W |
| Built | March 1, 1928 |
| Architect | B. Marcus Priteca |
| NRHP Reference # | 74001959 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | October 19, 1974 |
| Designated SEATL | February 13, 1995 |
The Paramount Theatre is a 2,807-seat performing arts venue located at 9th Avenue and Pine Street in Seattle, Washington. The theater originally opened March 1, 1928 as the Seattle Theatre with 3,000 seats, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 9, 1974. It is also an official City of Seattle landmark. It is 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 and the Neptune Theater in the University District. The Paramount was built expressly for showing film and secondarily, vaudeville. As of 2009, the Paramount is 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.
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:
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