[For this year’s installment of my annual Charlottesville series—following the boys and my annual trip to my childhood home, natch—I’ll focus on a handful of representative places around town. Leading up to a tribute to the public schools that nurtured this AmericanStudier!]
On three
telling details about the city’s most
historic movie theater.
1)
The Golden Age: Charlottesville’s Paramount
Theater opened on the day before Thanksgiving in November 1931. It was designed by
the Chicago architects
Rapp & Rapp, who were the architects behind the entire Paramount chain
of theaters (including the most famous one in Times Square),
and so it was located squarely in the traditions of that iconic period in
cinematic and Hollywood history. But to honor Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, C.W. and George Rapp gave this
Paramount Theater a level of opulence far beyond their norm, including
brass chandeliers, painted tapestries, an octagonal auditorium, and the justly
famous Greek façade. Such luxuries might seem ironic in a building that opened
two years into the Great Depression, and they certainly reflect image rather
than reality (as the next paragraph will illustrate even more clearly). But a beautiful
building is a beautiful building, and the Paramount was and remains one of
Cville’s most beautiful buildings.
2)
A Segregated Space: If such details made the
Paramount stand apart from the rest of Charlottesville’s landscape, however, in
one crucial way it was precisely the same as everywhere
else in 1930s (and 40s, and 50s) Cville: it was racially segregated.
African American audience members had to enter the theater by a
separate door (on an entirely different street from the front entrance) and
sit in the balcony. The theater’s
official website notes that Rapp & Rapp gave this segregated entrance “a
level of decoration and elegance sized for the smaller scale,” making “the
design of the Third Street Entrance complementary to—not divorced from—that of
the building as a whole.” Maybe that’s true—these 21st
century pictures seem to capture some sense of that, at least—and I suppose
is a space is going to be segregated (as virtually all of them were in 1930s
Charlottesville and Virginia), at least each part of it can still be
attractive. But at the same time, who the fuck cares what the “Colored” entrance
of a theater looked like, y’know?
3)
Preservation and Performance: So in both the
best and the worst ways, the Paramount Theater was an iconic slice of
Charlottesville history throughout the mid-20th century. Although
the growth in alternative theaters and entertainment options forced the theater
to close
in 1974, the city’s and late 20th century’s interests in
historic preservation led to immediate and sustained efforts to save the
building from demolition and restore it to some level of operation. Thirty
years after that closure the preservationists finally and fully succeeded, with
the Paramount reopening as a
working theater in 2004; it took another decade for the famous sign to be
restored, but it was illuminated
again in 2015. Yet while the theater has hosted numerous performances since
that reopening, it is itself enacting a different kind of performance, as there
is (to my knowledge) no recognition on site of the segregated entrance and
seating, of that fraught layer to the Paramount’s and community’s histories. As
with so much Cville
collective memory, then, there’s more work to be done.
Tribute
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Defining places—from your hometowns or anywhere else—you’d
highlight?
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