Minor Theater: One of the Oldest Movie Houses Still Running

Downtown Arcata is home to the Minor Theater, one of the oldest surviving movie theaters in the United States purpose-built for film. Isaac Minor broke ground in April of nineteen fourteen and opened the house on December third of that same year with a silent film. Minor built in reinforced concrete specifically for fire safety, a real concern at a time when nitrate film stock was notoriously flammable, and he lined the building with exits.

The cost was twenty thousand dollars. The theater closed during hard times in nineteen thirty-eight, reopened in the fifties, closed again in the sixties when television took hold, and came back in nineteen seventy-two. Independent ownership took over again in two thousand sixteen.

Over more than a century it has screened silents, talkies, drive-in-era blockbusters, and art house films, outlasting dozens of grander theaters that opened around the same time.