The Landmark Theatre

On South Salina Street, there is a theater that the architect Thomas Lamb described as European, Byzantine, Romanesque, which is the Orient as it came to us through the merchants of Venice. That description does not quite prepare you for walking in.

Loew's State Theatre opened on February eighteenth, nineteen twenty-eight, and it seated nearly three thousand people, the largest theater in the city. The opening night bill featured William Haines and Joan Crawford in "West Point" and, on the stage, a Broadway production called "Milady's Fan." The lobby held a forty-thousand-dollar Tiffany chandelier. Upstairs: a pagoda fountain and a fishpond. Inside the main house: a fourteen-hundred-pipe Wurlitzer organ. The ceiling was painted to evoke the night sky over some imaginary, opulent eastern city. An eight-story office tower sat above it all.

Movie palaces existed to make ordinary people feel, for a few hours, that they were living inside something extraordinary. This one was built at the moment when that idea was most fully realized, right before the Depression made the dream harder to sustain.

The Depression came. The theater kept going. The Second World War came. The theater was where you went when you needed to feel that there was still something grand in the world. By the early nineteen seventies, with the rise of suburban multiplexes and a declining downtown, Loew's State fell into trouble. It closed briefly in nineteen seventy-five.

A group of citizens formed the Syracuse Area Landmark Theater organization and fought to save it. They succeeded. Renamed the Landmark Theatre, it was restored and reopened. Today it presents Broadway touring productions, rock concerts, and events, still dressed in its Byzantine plumage.

There is exactly one theater like this left in Syracuse. The others are parking lots.