The Seattle Times promised an acre of seats in a palace of splendor, and the building delivered - then needed a Microsoft millionaire to save it. The Paramount Theatre at 911 Pine Street in downtown Seattle opened on 1 March 1928 as the Seattle Theatre, a 3,000-seat movie palace built by Paramount Pictures. The design paired Chicago's movie-palace masters Rapp and Rapp with local legend B. Marcus Priteca, wrapping a French Renaissance auditorium inside a combined theatre-and-office tower; the house survived the silent-to-talkie transition, the Depression, a Cinerama phase and decades of rock bookings. The rescue came from Ida Cole, the former Microsoft vice-president who bought the near-derelict landmark in 1993 and spent 37 million dollars restoring it - stage expansion, seismic work, plaster and gold-leaf restoration, new load-in and dressing rooms - reopening in March 1995 with Miss Saigon and her stated goal of a kissable, people's theatre. The floor is a piece of engineering theatre: the Paramount was the first venue in the United States with a convertible floor system, swapping between 2,807 fixed seats and a flat general-admission ballroom that pushes concert capacity toward 3,000. The operator is the nonprofit Seattle Theatre Group, which also runs the Moore and Neptune theatres, filling the calendar with Broadway tours, headline concerts, comedy and the silent-film series that keeps the building's original Wurlitzer tradition alive. Practical notes: the theatre sits a block from the Westlake light-rail station at Ninth and Pine, on the National Register since 1974; the steep second balcony rewards early booking, and convention-center crowds make weeknight parking tighter than the neighborhood suggests. The building nearly died more than once: demolition threats recurred from the 1970s through its most serious near-death experience in 1992, the crisis that brought Cole's intervention - a rescue historians rank among the great American theatre saves.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 911 Pine Street, Seattle, WA, United States, 98101

Website: https://www.stgpresents.org/paramount

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 2807

Opening Date: 01/03/1928

Accessible