Sale Will Keep Paramount Going

The Paramount Theatre has gotten its act together with a new partner who will help settle longtime financial woes and get the property out of bankruptcy.

Paramount Theatre Partners has taken over the theater and apartments at Ninth Avenue and Pine Street, under terms of a deal proposed a year ago.

The WLS Theater Group, Portland-based investors headed by Steven Stiles with Brett Wilcox and Sidney Leiken, and former Paramount owners Israel Volotin and the West Coast Theater Corp. make up the new partnership.

The Portland investors brought about $5 million to the deal and another half-million dollars was contributed by a small group of Seattle investors, said Eulysses Lewis, president of the West Coast Theater Corp.

The property had been in bankruptcy for nearly three years. It includes 39 apartments and the theater in a nine-story building dating back to the 1920s.

The new owners will continue to lease the building to the Historical Theater Association.

The group plans to upgrade the building.

Volotin was facing a Dec. 1 deadline that would have allowed U.S. Bank and other lien holders to foreclose. The new deal satisfies the lenders and will enable the partners to take the theater out of federal bankruptcy, said Lewis.