Midway Drive-In
24050 Pacific Highway South,
Des Moines,
WA
98198
24050 Pacific Highway South,
Des Moines,
WA
98198
No one has favorited this theater yet
The largest single screen drive-in theater in the area. The theater has been closed for a number of years. The original wooded fencing was replaced about ten years ago with chainlink. The theater and lobby area are still standing but in a state of disrepair. The area is used every weekend for a swap meet and food is still sold out of the snack bar.
Unfortunately the swap meet closed after summer 2004 and the theater and all buildings were torn down in fall of 2005 for a new Lowes Home Improvement store.
Contributed by
Marc Levick
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 9 comments)
I saw ET on this theater when I was a young kid. My very first “drive in” movie.
I’ve been to a couple of the swap meets that are held at the theater and the screen is really run down and an eye sore. It would be neat if Lowe’s could incorporate the old screen into their development. It’s about the only thing remaining of the old “Midway” neighborhood.
When I was a little girl, I remember zipping along I-5 with my parents and trying to catch the tiniest glimpse of what was playing on the screen. It was so hard. (I did better seeing what was on the screen at the Fife drive-in.)
To this day, when I’m driving on I-5, I still look toward the Midway screen — which is more visible now that trees have been cut down between the freeway and the theater — and I always hope that magically there’ll be a movie playing on that screen.
I know that won’t happen… So sad.
The address for the Midway is 24050 Pacific Highway S. The drive-in was reportedly built in 1940.
The screen at the Midway Drive-in was also a claustrophically skinny three-story “house” in which the manager lived in the 1960s & 1970s. It wasn’t much of a place to live in but hey, free rent. I was friends with the family when small & really liked climbing around in their skinny house. My great-grampa was the grounds cleaner & we had free popcorn up the wazoo, which was popped elsewhere & shipped in & stale as popcorn can get without turning into compost. In the 1950s many cars had “spotlights” attached to the driver-size window, & every night before the movie would start, there would be a game of “Spotlight” on the screen — a film of little moving squiggles & objects that people would follow around with their cars' spotlights.
The Midway Drive-In is now history. Its weekend swap meets ended on Sunday, 9/25/05.
It stopped running film in 1987… opting instead for the big bucks they could make as a swap meet… 500 merchants in their 1,000 car field, eventually another 240 or so in an enclosed building… up to 10,000 shoppers per day. The money involved made dropping the movies an easy decision, sad though that was.
The comment about their “stale” popcorn was amusing! The chain (United Drive-Ins) doesn’t appear to have popped their own corn at any of their Washington drive-ins… at least as far as I’m aware. They purchased their corn “pre-popped” from a local concession supply company, and yes… it could sit around for quite a while before being eventually served to the customers. Believe it or not, there are still a couple of theatres around that buy their corn like that… pretty amazing, considering how sensitive today’s customers seem to be about fresh popcorn. Today, they do pop their own at the only drive-in they have left, the “Valley 6”, in Auburn, WA. The pre-popped stuff was getting pretty nasty!
The Midway screen was said to be one of the largest on the West coast, measuring 56 X 115 feet. According to one of its caretakers, it was built in the late ‘60s (the original screen burned down). Even from the back rows of the drive-in, the picture would have been comfortably large enough for viewing (is that what they did in the back row?).
All in all, it is sad to see such a well-built drive-in be replaced by something else, but it was probably inevitable. The property is surrounded by development, it was a single-screen theatre (hard to make a living at these days), and could not have been expanded or multiplexed.
My husband and I were driving down Interstate 5 today, and it appeared as though the screen and sign are gone. Am I right, or was I imagining things???
FYI: The screen/sign are gone, and construction has begun on the new Lowes store. I couldn’t believe how sad it made me to not see that screen as I drove down Interstate 5.
Not listed in my 1956 Motion Picture Almanac,could be listed by another nearby city?
This opened as Northwest Motor-In theatre on April 29th, 1942 and renamed in 1950 as Midway Drive-In.