I.Viddy

19 x 13 Photograph by Mister Viddy

(From Wikipedia Entry)

The Laurelhurst Theater was built by Walter Tebbetts in 1923.  Tebbetts later built the Hollywood Theatre (1926) and the Oriental Theatre (1927).  In 1924, The Sunday Oregonian described the $30,000 theater as “one of the most up-to-date motion-picture houses in Portland’s suburbs.”  Charles W. Ertz was the building’s architect, and G.O. Garrison was the original owner of the theater, which had a $15,000 pipe organ and seated an audience of 700 people.  The immediate neighborhood at the time included the central eastside car (trolley) barns of the Portland Railway, Light and Power Company and Kerns Public School, and the restricted residential neighborhood of Laurelhurst was nearby.  The Sunday Oregonian published brief plot summaries for films scheduled to appear at the Laurelhurst. On March 15, 1925, the summaries for the week described Manhandled, starring Gloria Swanson; Monsieur Beaucaire, starring Rudolph Valentino, and North of 36, “the story of the first cattle drive and the fearless girl who showed the way.”

The original theater had a single screen. Periodic renovations included one advertised in 1938 that promised “ultramodern appointments and surroundings … sparkling and completely new.”  In 1949, the Laurelhurst closed briefly for another remodeling, and in 1953 management replaced the theater screen with an “ultra-wide curved screen.”  Eventual expansion to four viewing rooms with separate screens was not enough to compete successfully with the new mulitplex theaters built elsewhere in Portland in the 1980s.  Childhood friends Woody Wheeler and Prescott Allen purchased and renovated the theater again in 2000.

Tags: Art, Photography, Portland, Theater

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