The Embassy Theatre: Saved by the People
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
On May fourteenth, nineteen twenty eight, the Emboyd Theatre opened in downtown Fort Wayne with an ambition that matched the era. Designed by celebrated theatre architect John Eberson, with the overall building scheme by local architect A.M. Strauss, the Emboyd was simultaneously a two hundred fifty-room hotel, a Beaux-Arts showplace, and the premiere entertainment venue in northeastern Indiana.
The vaudeville era was at its height. Acrobats, magicians, comedians, and musicians played the Emboyd's stage for nearly twenty five years. The house organ, a Grande Page Pipe Organ installed at opening, is a rare surviving theatre organ that still plays in its original home.
When vaudeville died and movies took over, the Emboyd transitioned. When television arrived and moviegoing declined, it began to struggle. By the early nineteen seventies, it faced demolition. The economics of maintaining a vast, ornate movie palace no longer worked.
What saved it was the community. In nineteen seventy two, a broad coalition of Fort Wayne residents organized to rescue the building, known since nineteen fifty-two as the Embassy Theatre. The effort succeeded. The Embassy became a nonprofit performing arts center, and has operated in that capacity ever since.
The interior that was saved is a Rococo spectacle: painted ceilings, ornate chandeliers, gilded plasterwork, arched windows. It was described at opening as a phantasmagoric celestial environment, which sounds like marketing language until you actually walk in.
Fort Wayne has demolished a great deal of its architectural past. The Embassy is a monument to the times when it did not.
