A movie theater in Rainier Valley once again
"We'd go in, buy a 5-cent box of pretzels and watch Elvis Presley movies," she said. "I loved them so much that sometimes I would sit through them twice."
The next generation of Rainier Valley youth, however, had limited options for seeing a movie in their neighborhood. The current generation has none.
That is about to change.
A neighborhood movie house is returning to Rainier Valley. Paul Doyle, former owner of the Grand Illusion Cinema, an independent art house in the University District, has rented an abandoned Masonic lodge along the stretch of Rainier Avenue South known as Columbia City. He plans to convert the building's second floor into a single-screen cinema that will feature first-run mainstream and alternative niche films.
The movie house marks another example in Columbia City's transformation from a commercial strip of boarded-up storefronts, drug dealers and prostitutes to one of coffeehouses, restaurants and specialty gift stores.
Shari Kaufman, who has lived in Rainier Valley since 1989, was unable to bridle her enthusiasm as she met Doyle during Friday night's Columbia City "BeatWalk," a monthly community event featuring live music. "The word is out on the street, and people are very excited," she said, thanking him profusely. And that excites Doyle, who is taking a gamble by opening a movie theater to serve a neighborhood that historically has been underserved. Although U.S. census figures show Rainier Valley — and particularly Columbia City — have outpaced the city as a whole in income growth between 1990 and 2000, basic neighborhood amenities taken for granted in the North End and West Seattle are mere coffee talk in the South End.
"When my friends and I get together, we write down what we think the neighborhood needs," said Carolyn Stern, who has lived in the South End for 13 years. "A movie theater always has been near the top of our list."
Doyle is granting the neighborhood its wish purely by fluke.
While driving along Rainier Avenue South on the way to a meeting in February, he saw a "for lease" sign hanging on the front of the two-story white building that shares the same block as a bank and a Starbucks. A Green Lake resident, he said it was maybe the second time in five years he had visited Rainier Valley.
"I wasn't thinking Columbia City at all," he said. "I wasn't even thinking movie theater."
He toured the place and after walking up to the second floor, he was hooked. Greeting him was a large room with wood floors. The windows looked north toward a peek-a-boo view of Lake Washington. He imagined a grand theater lobby.
When the door opened to the lodge's auditorium, Doyle said to himself, "This is what I've been looking for my entire life." While never used as a movie theater, the room's layout seemed well suited for it with a stage up front, high ceilings and an elevated alcove at the rear, ideal for a projectionist.
To make the theater financially viable, Doyle plans to run it as a nonprofit supported through subscriptions, with nonmember customers also welcome. He hopes to generate additional revenue by running a crafts mall on the first floor that could open as soon as late this month. Doyle also is searching for a tenant to operate a daytime cafe in the building, which boasts a full-service kitchen.
He hopes residents excited about the cinema will volunteer to help him spiff up the space before he opens it this fall.
Rainier Valley has a rich and interesting — and at one time tawdry — history of movie-going. Eric Flom, a contributor to www.historylink.org, said several movie houses operated in the neighborhood during a golden age in the 1910s and '20s. They include the Princess, the American, the Orcas and the Columbia.
Bratton, the Elvis fan, has fond memories from the 1960s of the Columbia, which stood a couple of blocks south of where Doyle plans to open his cinema.
"The theater was a down-home, family-oriented place where parents had no problem dropping off their kids and picking them up after the movie," she said. "It was a safe place for kids to have fun for a couple of hours."
The space that once housed the Columbia reopened early in the 1970s as the Rainier Cinema, running movies targeting an African-American audience and thus reflecting a demographic change that had taken place. Rainier Valley's black population more than doubled from 1970 to 1980, according to the census. In Columbia City specifically, the black population tripled during that span.
The Rainier nevertheless was shuttered after a few years, the owners unable to outbid the downtown movie houses for first-run black films. The theater eventually operated as an X-rated movie house until the mid-1980s.
The last movie house to operate in Rainier Valley was the Toyo Cinema, about a mile south of Columbia City on Rainier Avenue. It screened Asian-language films until it shut down in the mid-1990s.
At Friday's "BeatWalk," Kaufman said the closest movie theater for her family to patronize these days is in Renton or downtown Seattle. Her 12-year-old daughter, Laura Baron, is particularly eager for Doyle to open his cinema.
"My friends from the North End go to a movie almost every weekend because there are so many theaters where they live," she said. "The last time I saw a movie at a theater was like a year ago."
Seattle Times news researcher Gene Balk contributed to this report.
Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293.