Bagdad Comes To Ballard
PREV
|
 WEBSTER AN STEVENS/COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF HISTORY & INDUSTRY THEN: What is now known as the Ballard Building, at the northwest corner of 22nd Avenue Northwest and Market Street, was completed in 1927 for the Eagles Lodge and the Bagdad Theatre. More than anything that preceded it, the building represented the shift of Ballard's principal commercial strip from the narrow, red brick Ballard Avenue to the wide Market Street.
PAUL DORPAT NOW: A good percentage of Pacific Northwest readers will have figured out that this week's "Now" was photographed on the same Ballard Seafood Fest weekend as last week's "Now" and that both look across parts of Ballard's principal commercial intersection where Market Street, 22nd Avenue Northwest and Leary Way meet. |
Since its construction in 1927, the Ballard Building has outshone its neighbors with its ambitious size and classical skin made of gleaming terra-cotta tiles. Originally named the Eagles Building for the fraternal organization that built it, the landmark was more often called the Bagdad Theatre, after its first principal commercial tenant.
With 1,000 seats, the Bagdad was by one claim the largest neighborhood theater in Seattle. Another old story about the theater-cum-lodge building is that some 10,000 attended its May 28, 1927, opening to brush, and sometimes crush, against the green velvet drapes of its luxurious Persian decor and gaze up into its kaleidoscopic dome.
The celebrants were also enveloped in the beautiful noise of the Bagdad's oversized and costly, at $25,000, Wurlitzer organ. Of course, across America the opening that fall of '27 of Al Jolson as "The Jazz Singer" in the first of the new "talkies" to use synchronized spoken dialogue (and singing) meant that very soon the Bagdad's big new organ would be used less and less.
The size of this theater made it particularly vulnerable to the postwar changes in taste, mobility and that puny but convenient new screen, television. Still, in the 20-plus years it survived, the fantastic, funny, exotic and scary stuff cast upon the Bagdad's big screen stocked the imagination of many a Ballard boy and girl. It also let them meet and, in more than a few instances, no doubt, that and shared popcorn led to the stocking of new Ballard families.
"Washington Then and Now," the new book by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, can be purchased through www.washingtonthenandnow.com ($45) or through Tartu Publications at P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.
|
|
|
|
Back to top