Rex Theatre
1300 Third Avenue,
Seattle,
WA
98101
1300 Third Avenue,
Seattle,
WA
98101
No one has favorited this theater yet
Contributed by
William Gabel
Want to be emailed when a new comment is posted about this theater?
Just login to your account and subscribe to this theater
Recent comments (view all 16 comments)
Address:
1300 3rd Ave
Seattle, WA 98101
This is a circa 1938 photo of the Palomar Theater.
In the first comment on the page vodvilnut gives a date of 1915 for the construction of this theatre, but the PSTOS page Lost Memory linked to last January gives a construction date of 1911. Both dates also appear at various other sites on the Internet. Can anybody confirm one date or the other? I know that B. Marcus Priteca designed his first Pantages Theatre (in San Francisco) in 1911. Could he have designed and gotten the Seattle house built as well in that same year?
I also find conflicting dates Joe. This website gives the 1911 date. The site pretty much repeats the information contained on the PSTOS website. In case the link expires, this is the text portion:
The Pantages Theatre had two locations. The first location was a smaller vaudeville house.
The second location was much larger. It was designed by B. Marcus Priteca and built by Alexander Pantages in 1911. The theatre was located at the corner of Third Avenue and University Street on the site of the old Plymouth Congregational Church.
When the Danz Brothers took control of the house and renamed it the “Palomar.”
The theater continued under various names (including Mayfair and Rex) until 1965, when it was torn down to build a parking garage.
A clue might be on the PSTOS website. There is a program shown there that claims to be from December of 1912. If that program is from the second Pantages Theater, it must have opened prior to 1915.
Here is a circa 1905 photo of another Pantages Theater. Location given is Northeast corner of 2nd Ave. and Seneca St. This is probably the “smaller vaudeville house” that was mentioned in my comment above this one.
Here is a circa 1917 photo of the Pantages Theater.
About the two Pantages Theaters construction dates… there’s an article on Alexander Pantages in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly (October 1966), and on p. 142 it states the new vaudeville house at 3rd and University had to wait until his Canadian theaters were completed, and they were still under construction in 1914. Also, it seems to imply that he didn’t even purchase the land at 3rd/University until 1912 or later. The ticket image on the PSTOS site is too blurry to tell if it belonged to the first or second Pantages. I’ve read elsewhere that the first one closed in 1914, so perhaps the ticket was from there?
As the Palomar in 1969:
View link
Here is a movie program from the Pantages Theatre from April, 1929. The program is so jam-packed full of ads that it is difficult to tell which movies are actually playing.
June 25th, 1936 grand opening ad as Palomar has been posted here.