The Paramount Theatre: the last downtown palace built

Opened October 3, 1930 — closed July 13, 1961 — demolished 1962

A palace for the talkies: The Paramount Theatre at 121 East Wayne Street was the last of Fort Wayne's great downtown houses and, with the Emboyd, one of the two largest and most ornate ever built in the city. The News-Sentinel marked its arrival with a special section when it opened on October 3, 1930 — the public opening followed on October 4 — with Buddy Rogers in Follow Thru as the first attraction. It was a Paramount-Publix house, built for sound pictures from the start but equipped, as the palaces still were, with a Wurlitzer theatre organ of three manuals and eleven ranks; the lobby murals were the work of the muralist Louis F. Grell, and the bas-relief plasterwork of the Paramount, as of the Emboyd, was modeled by Fort Wayne sculptor Paul F. Nachtigall. Its listed seating in the trade yearbooks ran to about 1,268. The Paramount was the palace generation's final statement downtown: no house of its scale was built in Fort Wayne after it until the Clyde, twenty-one years later and out on the Bluffton Road.

Thirty-one years: The Paramount's run was the shortest of the great houses. Television took its audience in the 1950s, and the theatre closed after its last showtimes on July 13, 1961. It was demolished in 1962 — a neighbor who helped salvage memorabilia from the wrecking put the year at 1962 or 1963 — and its fixtures began a long afterlife: the young Jim Saxton, who had worked at the Paramount as a teenager, spent decades rescuing and restoring historic Fort Wayne lighting fixtures, crumbling remains of the Paramount's among them, an avocation traced in interviews to his years in its booth and lobby. The site, on the north side of the 100 block of East Wayne, is an office block today.

Sources:

1. Cinema Treasures, Paramount Theatre, 121 E. Wayne Street — the October 3, 1930 opening with Buddy Rogers in "Follow Thru," the Wurlitzer of 3 manuals and 11 ranks, the July 13, 1961 closing, and demolition in 1962; its comments — the October 4, 1930 public opening per the grand-opening advertisement, Paul F. Nachtigall's plasterwork and the News-Sentinel's special section, Louis F. Grell's lobby murals (Marquee, 2014), and the seat count of 1,268 from the Film Daily Year Book against the studio reports.
2. Beatty and Robb (2006), as cited in the University of Saint Francis Jefferson paper — the Emboyd and the Paramount as the largest and most ornate theatres ever built in the city.
3. History Center Digital Collections (Indiana Memory) — the Paramount Theatre Building photographed on the north side of the 100 block of East Wayne Street.
4. ACGSI, Allen INGenWeb, S surnames, from WBOI (February 1, 2017) — Jim Saxton's fixture-rescue work and its origin in his teenage job at the Paramount.