page_title: Cinemas in Portland, Oregon
section_title: 1950–1980: Drive-ins and demolitions
hierarchical_section_title: Cinemas in Portland, Oregon / History / 1950–1980: Drive-ins and demolitions
caption_attribution_description: Oregon Theatre, Portland (2014)
context_page_description: At the advent of the 20th century, the city of Portland, Oregon, was among the first on the United States West Coast to embrace the advent of the silent and feature film. The city's first movie palace, the Majestic Theatre, opened in 1911. By 1916, Portland had "the finest array" of movie houses on the West Coast relative to its population, pioneering venues dedicated exclusively to screening films. The popularization of the sound film in the early 1920s resulted in another boom of new cinemas being constructed, including the Laurelhurst, the Hollywood Theatre, and the Bagdad Theatre, the latter of which was financed by Universal Pictures in 1926.
  By the mid-20th century, several of the cinemas and movie palaces in Portland were demolished, including the Majestic, the Playhouse Theatre, and the Oriental Theatre. The Portland Publix Theater, is the only cinema in downtown Portland that has survived into the 21st century, having served as the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall since 1984.
context_section_description: Beginning around the 1950s, many cinemas in the city underwent renovations, while others were outright destroyed. The Playhouse Theatre (originally the Baker, and formerly known as the Dufwin, Alcazar, Music Box, and El Capitan in the interim) was closed in June 1950. The building was used for church services before being demolished in 1954. The following year, the Majestic Theatre closed, and was eventually demolished in 1957 to make way for the Union Bank Tower. Three months after the demolition of the Majestic, the People's Theater, a movie house built in 1911 (subsequently named the Alder Theatre and the Music Box in the 1930s), was razed as well. The Oriental Theatre was also demolished several years later in April 1970. In the weeks prior to its demolition, various pieces of furniture and other fixtures from the cinema's interiors were auctioned to locals. The Academy Theater closed in 1977, and was used as a printing facility for the ensuing two decades.
  In the 1960s, some of the city's older venues turned toward screening pornographic films, and became adult movie theaters; among these were the Paris Theatre, which screened adult films from 1963 into the 1980s, and the Star Theatre, which operated primarily as an adult theater from the 1960s until 1983. The Oregon Theatre began showing adult films around the 1970s, following the success of Deep Throat (1972).
  Drive-in cinemas began to grow in popularity in the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s, and the first in Portland—the 82nd Street Drive-in—was constructed in 1948. Construction on the Powell Boulevard Drive-in began in southeast Portland in 1954, despite legal protests from neighborhood residents. A third drive-in on the city's east side, the 104th Street Drive-in, was built in 1959. The Foster Drive-in, located on SE Foster Road, was established in 1969. The first multiplex in Portland, the Eastgate Theater, opened in 1966 on SE 82nd Avenue, and featured two screens and state-of-the-art sound. The Fifth Avenue Cinema, located in southwest Portland along the edge of the Portland State University campus, was opened as a Moyer Theater in 1970. After ten years of operation, the cinema was acquired by Portland State, and has been operated by the university film department since. In 1974, the Bagdad underwent renovation, and was divided to contain two separate screens.
caption: Cinemas such as the Oregon Theatre began showing pornographic films in the 1970s
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