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Paramount Theatre (Seattle)

theatre and movie theater in Seattle, Washington, United States

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ3363536 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Paramount Theatre is a 2,807-seat performing arts venue located at 9th Avenue and Pine Street in the downtown core of Seattle, Washington, United States. The theater originally opened on 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, and has also been designated a City of Seattle landmark.

The Paramount is owned and operated by the Seattle Theatre Group, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit performing arts organization which also runs the 1,768-seat Moore Theatre in Belltown and the Neptune Theatre in the University District. Initially it was built expressly for showing film and secondarily, vaudeville. As of 2009, the Paramount is operated as a venue for various performing arts, serving its patron base with Broadway musical theatre, concerts, dance, comedy, family engagements, silent film and jazz. It is one of the busiest theatres in the region.

History

During the 1920s, particularly before the first sound films, or "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.

Editorial summary

“Paramount Theatre (Seattle)” enters the record as theatre and movie theater in Seattle, Washington, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Paramount, Theatre and Seattle can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive route into publication, performance and collection histories when the underlying object or edition remains clearly identified. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1928, 1974, 2009, 1927—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Paramount, Theatre and Seattle.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Paramount Theatre (Seattle)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Paramount, Theatre and Seattle provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3363536. Authority coordinates are 47.613, -122.331. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1974, 2009 and 1927.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Paramount Theatre (Seattle)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Paramount Theatre (Seattle) primary sources, Paramount Theatre (Seattle) archive and Paramount research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Paramount Theatre (Seattle)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.