The Egyptian on Washington Boulevard

When the Arlington Hotel burned to the ground in nineteen twenty-three, the cleared lot it left behind on Washington Boulevard became a decision point for two Ogden businessmen named Harman and Louis Peery. They could sell the land. They could wait. Instead they hired the architectural firm of Hodgson and McClenahan and told them to build the showplace of the West.

The firm had been following the Egyptian Revival wave sweeping American theater design, the same wave that produced Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Howard Carter had opened Tutankhamun's tomb in November nineteen twenty-two. America could not get enough of Egypt. On July third, nineteen twenty-four, ten months after construction began, the Peery Egyptian Theatre opened. The first film screened was a Western: Zane Grey's Wanderer of the Wasteland.

The interior was built to suggest an Egyptian temple courtyard open to the desert sky. The domed ceiling was studded with small electric lights arranged to produce the effects of night, a golden sunset, and the silver light of dawn. The theater held eight hundred seats and was constructed of poured concrete, a deliberate choice by the Peerys, who had watched fire kill theater after theater in American cities and wanted a building that would last.

It lasted. Peery's Egyptian is one of fewer than fifty Egyptian-style theaters built in the United States, and one of perhaps a dozen still standing. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight.

The theater is still operating today, hosting live performances, film events, and community programs. The dome ceiling is intact. The lights still run through their cycle of night, sunset, and dawn, the way they did when Ogden filled the seats to watch Zane Grey flicker across the screen in July of nineteen twenty-four.