Why did we do this? Read our case for making the marquee a landmark. The building itself, a wood-frame of average quality, is not special. But its green and cream interiors trimmed with silver must have seemed so to a Seattle Daily Times reporter in 1911, when 201 Broadway Avenue East was takin g its first infant gasp as the Society Theatre. A fitting name, the 500-seat “smart little playhouse” was the height of technological sophistication with its efficient ventilation system and two Powers No. 6 moving picture machines, which allowed the projectionist to play films back-to-back without intermission. (Enough to brag about. More than half a century later, they’d advertise another technological marvel—“Now: For Your Enjoyment Completely Air Conditioned.”) The manager, George W. Ring, a Portlander with “a large, expansive smile” later appointed to Seattle’s censor board by Mayor Hugh M. Caldwell, prophesied it’d be as much of a goldmine as the theater a block south, where it was common to see 20 automobiles outside the doors before showtime. Ring, an oilman and race horse breeder, would die in 1957. In his stewardship, the Society Theatre tried its best to stay on the cutting edge. One ad from 1918 touted the 8-reel Tarzan of the Apes as “the photoplay that’s different.” In 1919, it screened the feminist allegory Everywoman, a now lost silent film, before women had the right to vote. More than movies graced the stage in those early years. There was an amateur play about a college freshman (“the romance has the usual happy ending”), a military academy slide deck and movie projecting a rosy life for Seattle’s wayward boys, and Republican speeches skewering Democrats for their anti-imperialist, low-tariff stance. In 1916, a candidate for coroner told a crowd at the Society he supported women on coroner’s juries both because it was their right and because they were better at it than men. That same year, the magazine Motography wrote about Ring’s “ingenious scheme” for a restroom in the theater where mothers could take their crying children and still see and hear the film. “There is no doubt that the mothers will all patronize this theater.” According to a 1961 obituary, the theatre’s former pianist for silent films, Florence Lillian Carr, was later known as the “dahlia lady,” because she sold dahlias in the Broadway district. George W. Ring ran the theater with his wife, Frankie Ring. She took over when he was called to Camp Lewis to “ring in” the Kaiser during World War I. He survived the war, but if you consider the draft a misfortune, it was the first to befall a manager of this theater. The second was Frankie Ring herself, who was robbed of the day’s receipts on March 23, 1921, for an amount totalling $106, more than $1,800 today, adjusted for inflation. The third was manager P.J. DeClercq. In 1928, he (or a man by the same name) watched his father die from heart failure while reeling in a king salmon. He was on shore when his father keeled over. By the time he’d rowed frantically to him, Ralph de Vasseur was “stone dead across a seat.” Dangling at the end of the slack fishing line was the great king salmon, “also dead.” DeClercq was also sued by the “well-known Pacific Coast theatre man,” Harold Horne. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Horne accused DeClercq of luring him away from “a lucrative connection” to invest $10,000 into a corporation that would lease the Society for 99 years and buy the two adjoining lots. Horne charged that the lease cost $18,000 and the lots were taken out in DeClercq’s name, which Horne took as an attempt to defraud him. He wanted a receiver to take control of the theatre. In 1932, 30-year-old Jack Hallett, another Society manager, was struck by an automobile on North Broadway and Olive Way. The driver, F.J. Nist, said Hallett was “walking against the traffic light.” Nist, president of the Seattle Box Company, booked the largest single order of egg cases on the Pacific Coast in 1923 and was a prolific breeder of Chesapeake dogs. It’s hard to say if he was much of a driver. Some sources say the Society was renamed the Broadway in 1921, but newspaper clippings refer to a Society Theatre at the same address through at least 1932. The name had definitely changed by the 1940s, when the mission-style building was remodeled and given the distinctive marquee. The new name did nothing for the beleaguered, accident-prone managers. In 1965, Leslie W. Roe was also in a car accident that bruised an ankle. But of all the managers, Robert Johnson was unluckiest. In 1973, the assistant manager of Broadway Theater was murdered in his apartment at 211 11th Ave East, his body discovered in his bedroom after he failed to show up for work. Clad only in underwear, he’d been struck on the head with his own barbell. The impact had splattered the walls with blood. Neighbors had heard loud noises from the apartment at about 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. The suspected killer, Dean Mason, was found behind the wheel of Johnson’s 1971 Corvette in Orange County, California the next day, dead by a self-inflicted gunshot to the mouth. The papers didn’t print a motive or an explanation of how the men knew each other.  The only other detail I could find about Johnson is that, in 1972, the Rev. Robert Sirico wanted the Broadway Theater to be the first home of a “church ministering primarily to homosexuals.” It never happened—Rev. Sirico jumped the gun on the announcement before the details had been worked out. In the last year Johnson was at the Broadway, the theater started midnight screenings of underground, experimental, and rock-oriented films like Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. “The series is still a very mixed bag, featuring some quality films and plenty of pretentious junk,” wrote The Seattle Times’ brainy movie critic John Hartl in 1972. “But most of it is fresh and unfamiliar and offbeat.” In 1977, a series of mystery movie midnight screenings were screened to benefit the ACLU of Washington. The next year, Doubles, the first feature film to be financed and produced entirely by Northwest people, opened at the Broadway. There’s not much mention of the Broadway in the papers before its imminent closure—just ads, a story about a month-long samurai movie festival after the end of the original Shōgun TV miniseries, a short item about a crowd applauding someone for heckling a crying infant (the spirit of the rest room had died), and an unflattering description in The Seattle Times, of a cramped little theater that made up for the stuffiness with strong commercial and art-house fare, which indicated the air-conditioning had ceased to impress. In 1989, the owner, John Limantzakis, applied for a master-use permit to convert it to retail space. “If the venerable, well-patronized theater is to be closed, the Seven Gables Corp., which operates it, will not stand in the way,” the Times wrote. Allied Arts’ historic-preservation committee discussed the closure, and so did the Capitol Hill Community Council’s land-use committee. Broadway’s last screening was 1989’s We’re No Angels starring Sean Penn and Robert De Niro. The closure got 88 words in the Seattle Times, and the Pay ’n Save next door soon moved in. In 1990, it ran an ad inviting people to meet pharmacist Jay Cabiao and store manager Jody Meehan. The Pay ’n Save became a Rite Aid, which finally closed in 2023, after years limping along with seldom-stocked shelves. The marquee is still there. For now. Additional research by Brigid Kennedy. Documentation of George W. Ring’s conscription provided by Tom Heuser. The post The History of the Broadway Theater appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less