Now but four years short of its centennial, the Moore Theater at Second Avenue and Virginia Street has run touring plays, vaudeville, opera, concert series, musicals, political rallies and lectures. Beginning in 1935 it became the venue for impresario Cecilia Schultz, one of Seattle's cultural treasures, and in 1976 the Seattle International Film Festival got its start here.

 
WHEN THE Moore Theater opened in December of 1907 its namesake James Moore, then Seattle's resident super-developer, claimed it was the third-largest theater in the county. Moore was himself both large and large-mannered. When he died in San Francisco in 1929, this maxim was found in his papers: "Make no little plans. They have not magic to stir men's blood. Make big plans."

At the opening-night performance of "The Alaskan," a packed crowd gave Moore a standing ovation. Some were already standing, for the audience was a few hundred more than the 2,436-seat fire-code capacity. The innovative balcony was supported by such hefty steel girders that none of the action or oratory on the widest and deepest stage in town was obscured by posts.

That was on the inside. On the outside the Moore was restrained like we see it here, looking north on Second Avenue toward Virginia Street. Construction is not yet completed on most of the store fronts to either side of the also-unfinished stone arch to the Moore Hotel. Most likely it is the spring of 1908. "Coming Thro The Rye," a fine fair-weather musical fabricated from the lines of the poet Robert Burns, is advertised on the marquee.

A part of the old Denny Hill neighborhood is glimpsed on the far left across Virginia Street. Moore first proposed his theater in the fall of 1903, when Seattle contractor C.J. Erickson started lowering Second Avenue to its present grade between Pine and Denny streets. Before the regrade, the intersection at Virginia Street was in the valley between the south and north summits of Denny Hill. It was described as the "saddle on a two-humped camel." After the road work the intersection at Virginia was the highest on Second — as it is now.