Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

Frank Sinatra played his last Washington show at the reopening gala of a theater the wrecking ball nearly took. The Warner Theatre, at 513 13th Street NW in downtown Washington, opened on December 27, 1924 as the Earle - a velvet-draped picture palace the Washington Post called a pleasure to enter and a regret to leave. Architects C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim built an entertainment machine: a 2,200-plus-seat vaudeville and silent-film house with a rooftop garden theater, a 1,000-person basement ballroom and a 300-seat restaurant, all wrapped in neo-Renaissance splendor. Warner Brothers acquired the house in the 1940s, dropped the stage acts for a movies-only policy, and Harry Warner put his own name on the marquee in 1947; by the 1970s the palace had slid into disrepair, its survival championed by the DC Preservation League. The rescue came from developer Kaempfer Company, which bought the theater in 1987 and spent three years and $10 million - aided by a $4 million federal grant - restoring plasterwork, gilt, Portuguese draperies and the replicated central chandelier, reopening in October 1992 with Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. Operated today by Live Nation with 1,847 seats, the Warner books the capital's mid-size marquee traffic: touring comedians, rock and soul headliners, award shows, political events and the Washington Ballet's annual Nutcracker. The 2024 centennial celebrated a hundred years in the Penn Quarter entertainment district the theater helped define, steps from Metro Center and the National Theatre. America's Perfect Theatre, the 1924 publicists called it - and the restored room, one of the last of Washington's great palaces still working, makes the boast feel merely accurate. The 1924 basement ballroom survives in the building's event inventory, and the theater's interior was among the first in Washington protected as a designated historic landmark - the preservation fight that saved the Warner set the precedent for every DC palace that followed.