Paramount Arts Center, Ashland Kentucky

When it opened on September fifth, nineteen thirty-one, the Paramount Theatre in Ashland, Kentucky was designed to be a cathedral of popular entertainment in an industrial river city. What it became, over the following century, is something rarer: a surviving Art Deco jewel that anchors its downtown to this day.

The building was designed by the Chicago firm Rapp and Rapp, one of the most celebrated theater architecture practices in America. The Rapps built picture palaces from coast to coast, and their Ashland commission arrived at an interesting moment: the silent film era had just ended, replaced by talking pictures. The Paramount was originally intended as a silent-film house, but as construction proceeded, the plans were reworked to accommodate the new sound technology, making it one of the first theaters in the country built from the start for talkies. The design was considered so successful that it was displayed at the Chicago World's Fair.

The exterior is pale brick, restrained and confident. Inside, the palette shifts dramatically. The lobby and auditorium run to oxblood red, gold, bronze, and silver, with Egyptian Revival details woven through the Art Deco geometry: fluted bronze pilasters, frosted glass sconces, ornamented plasterwork. Depression-era budget cuts trimmed some of the original ambitions, but what was built remains striking.

After forty years as a cinema, the Paramount closed in nineteen seventy-one. The following year, the Greater Ashland Foundation acquired the building and reimagined it as a performing arts center, which is what it has been ever since. The renovation preserved the historic bones while adding the backstage infrastructure a modern venue requires.

Ashland sits on the tristate border where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet, in the heart of the eastern Kentucky coalfields. For a city of roughly twenty thousand people, sustaining a venue of this quality for nearly a hundred years is its own kind of achievement. The Paramount Arts Center is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and on the Kentucky Music Trail, a nod to its role in the cultural life of a region that has produced more country music stars per capita than almost anywhere else in America.