The Orpheum Theatre, Phoenix

Built in the 1920s boom

Phoenix grew fast in the 1920s. It passed Tucson to become Arizona's largest city in 1920, and over the following decade skyscrapers and movie palaces went up downtown as signs that the town had become a city. The Orpheum broke ground in 1927, the same year as Hotel San Carlos, the Westward Ho, the Luhrs Tower and the combined courthouse and city hall.

It was built for Rickards and Nace Amusement Enterprises, the chain Joseph E. Rickards and Harry L. Nace founded in 1918. Within ten years it ran sixteen theaters in six Arizona cities and was affiliated with Universal Pictures and the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. The theater's own history puts the cost at $750,000. The Phoenix firm Lescher and Mahoney designed it, with Hugh Gilbert as associate architect.

A mission garden under a night sky

The Orpheum is an "atmospheric" theater, a style in which the auditorium is built to feel like an open-air courtyard at dusk. Here the courtyard is the garden of a Spanish Colonial mission. The side walls are mission facades with arches and red tile roofs, murals of Arizona landscapes by Phoenix artist David Swing show through the openings, and projected clouds drift across a blue plaster ceiling until a sunset fades into twinkling stars.

Outside, the cast-stone cornice carries statues of Pan and masks of comedy and tragedy. On the Second Avenue side, the "Balcony of the Dons" holds sculptures of the conquistadors who passed through the region.

Opening night, January 5, 1929

The Orpheum opened on January 5, 1929, in a town of about 48,000 people. The Arizona Republican covered it under the headline "Orpheum Theater Opening Marks Epoch In City History." The program mixed the theater's own orchestra, the organ, vaudeville acts and a talking picture.

By the theater's account it had 1,800 seats, an early form of air conditioning and a stage 101 feet wide, which made it the only theater between Los Angeles and Denver that could take the weekly touring vaudeville shows. Over the years its stage hosted Mae West, Henry Fonda and Lauren Bacall, among others.

The Paramount, the Palace West and a near miss

Within months of the opening, Rickards and Nace sold their theaters to Paramount-Publix, and once vaudeville faded the Orpheum ran mainly as a movie house. It was renamed the Paramount around 1950 (the sources give 1949 and 1950). In 1968 the Nederlander Organization bought it for touring Broadway shows and called it the Palace West, and from 1977 it was leased out to show Spanish-language films.

By the early 1980s it was for sale and on its way to being torn down for a parking lot. The Junior League of Phoenix pushed to save it, and in 1984 the City of Phoenix bought the block, planning its new city hall for the rest of the site. The theater was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Phoenix voters approved $7 million toward the restoration in 1988, the Orpheum Theatre Foundation formed in 1989 to raise the rest, and the Orpheum name came back in 1991.

Restored and reopened

The Cleveland firm van Dijk, Pace, Westlake Architects led the restoration from 1986, adding a larger stage house and more lobby space, while Conrad Schmidt Studios restored the landscape murals. The Orpheum reopened on January 28, 1997, and the clouds drift across its ceiling again.