The Mount Baker Theatre and the Searchlight from a Warship

The spire at the top of the Mount Baker Theatre holds a story worth stopping for. When the theater was under construction in nineteen twenty-six, workers installed a searchlight at the peak of the tower. That searchlight had not been manufactured for a theater.

It came from the USS Oregon, a pre-dreadnought battleship that had served in the Spanish-American War of eighteen ninety-eight and was being decommissioned in Bremerton when theater builders purchased it at auction. On a clear night, once installed, that searchlight could be seen from as far south as Burlington and as far north as Blaine, sixteen miles of range across the bay. The theater itself was designed by architect Robert Reamer, who had also designed Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre, in a Moorish Revival style that was fashionable for American movie palaces in the nineteen twenties.

The exterior features arched entryways, decorative tilework, and a minaret-like tower that rises over downtown Bellingham without any particular reference to its Pacific Northwest setting, which was entirely the point. The goal was spectacle. The goal was to make you feel, the moment you stepped inside, that you had left ordinary Bellingham behind.

The theater opened in nineteen twenty-seven, built for Pacific Northwest Theaters Inc., and cost an estimated three hundred thousand dollars, roughly five and a half million in today's money. It seated fifteen hundred and seventeen people and contained an orchestra pit, a pipe organ, and a projection room.

It remains today the largest theatrical venue in Washington north of Seattle's Paramount and Fifth Avenue theaters. The city of Bellingham owns the building; a nonprofit manages it. Popular legend holds that the building is haunted by a ghost named Judy.

There is no verified source for this claim, but it has persisted for decades, which is its own kind of documentation.