page_title: John Considine (impresario)
section_title: The Orpheum (1911)
hierarchical_section_title: John Considine (impresario) / The Orpheum (1911)
caption_attribution_description: English: Sign for an annual opening of the Orpheum vaudeville at the Moore Theatre, Seattle, Washington.
context_page_description: John W. Considine was an American impresario, a pioneer of vaudeville.
context_section_description: From 1911, the flagship of Considine's chain was the Orpheum Theatre at 3rd Avenue and Madison Street in Seattle. Designed by William Kingsley, the $500,000 theater was constructed, insofar as possible, with materials and services obtained from within Washington state. The decorative wrought iron canopy extending from over the box office to the curb out became "a fixture of the 3rd Avenue landscape"; the lavish interior was "awash in marble, onyx, and glass." The murals of the equally lavish auditorium depicted classical and mythological themes: scenes from The Iliad and Odyssey, Aesop and the 12 Muses.
  Although the Orpheum was touted at the time of its 5 May 1911 opening as "America's most luxurious theater," after 1916 it no longer was even the grandest vaudeville theater in the neighborhood: Alexander Pantages opened an even larger and more opulent theater several blocks north at 3rd Avenue and University Street. The Orpheum vaudeville shows moved to the larger Moore Theatre, although the Orpheum continued to operate for many years, variously showing live shows and movies; it was renamed as the President Theatre. In the last years before it was torn down in 1949, it was used merely as a storage facility.
  This Orpheum was not Seattle's only theater by this name; indeed, it was Considine's third theater by this name in Seattle. The first had been one of Considine's first vaudeville theaters; the second was a renaming of Martin Beck's Coliseum Theater (no relation to the surviving 1917 Coliseum theater building, designed by B. Marcus Priteca for Pantages). A later Orpheum, also the work of Priteca, stood 1927–1967 at the corner of 5th Avenue and Stewart Street, now the site of the south tower of the Westin Hotel.
caption: A poster for a post-1916 Orpheum program at the Moore Theatre.
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