The Paramount Theatre
Near Cedar Rapids, Iowa
When the Capitol Theatre opened on September first, nineteen twenty-eight, the citizens of Cedar Rapids stepped into a room that had been designed to make them feel elevated. The half-block-long lobby featured a Hall of Mirrors modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. A grand staircase swept upward.
The Mediterranean Revival architecture, designed by the Milwaukee firm Peacock and Frank, was the kind of theatrical excess that movie palaces of the late silent era specialized in, the idea being that the building itself should be an event before the show began. The Capitol seated one thousand nine hundred forty-five people on opening night. It presented a full bill in its first year: vaudeville, comedians, singers, dancers, acrobats, silent films, and audience sing-alongs anchored by a Wurlitzer theater pipe organ.
In nineteen twenty-nine, as talking pictures swept through American entertainment and vaudeville's long decline accelerated, the theater affiliated with Paramount Studios and changed its name. The Paramount Theatre was listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six, a recognition of its architectural significance in a city that had no shortage of historic buildings. It seats one thousand six hundred ninety-three today, a reduction from the original configuration, and still anchors the performing arts calendar in Cedar Rapids.
In a city that could smell its own breakfast cereal from downtown and had built a county courthouse on a river island, the Paramount was the civic dream turned inward: the conviction, common to the nineteen twenties, that a community deserved the most beautiful room its builders could imagine.
