Oh, You'll Miss Me, Honey:
When Phoenix Changed Its Mind And Saved The Orpheum
by John Luke
THE STORY OF Phoenix’s Orpheum Theatre—which opened in January 1929, skirted demolition in the 1980s and was restored to its original splendor in the mid-1990s—follows the arc of Phoenix’s history through nearly eight decades, from the glory days of the city’s boom years in the twenties, through the depression, to Post–World War II suburban growth and urban abandonment, and finally to the renaissance of a vibrant downtown core over the past decade.
The Orpheum’s survival is not just a small miracle of historic preservation accomplished through an episode of cul-tural, civic and political imagination. It can also be seen as a monument to the age of vaudeville, which the social histo-rian Robert Snyder has called “the biblical era of twentieth-century American show business.”
Vaudeville’s stars, Snyder writes, “invigorated early radio, film, and television. Its format, a series of acts strung together, was transplanted to radio and television variety shows. Its theater circuits spawned chains of movie theaters. Its mass au-dience—constructed by calculating entrepreneurs, assembled in public, dynamically varied in its composition, signifi-cantly urban in its origins, knowledgeable and vocal in its demands—was the defining element of American popular culture for the first half of the twentieth century....
“Although vaudeville is now part of a receding past, in its history we can glimpse both a world we have lost and the embryonic forms of enduring patterns in American culture.”
PALACE IN THE DESERT
Phoenix’s Orpheum was one of the last in the legendary string of theater “palaces” built across the U.S. to present vaudeville shows produced by the Orpheum Circuit, which originated in New York City in the 1890s. Built just as vaude-ville was being eclipsed by the movies, the Phoenix Orpheum proved durable and flexible enough to adapt to the rise of motion pictures as the dominant American entertainment medium.
Writing in The Arizona Republic in 2004, Cathy Creno captured the atmosphere of the city when the Orpheum ap-peared on the scene.
“Flappers, vaudeville, Buck Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. were all the rage when the Orpheum Theatre opened in January 1929.
“Silent pictures were on their way out, the Great Depression had yet to hit. And Phoenix was finally on the map—having grown from an isolated farming community to a budding city with streetcars, a major railway line and a population of 49,000.
“The town’s mood was boisterous and boosterish.
“‘Phoenix fastest growing city of size in country,’ boasted a headline in The Arizona Republican on Jan. 5, the day the Orpheum opened.
“Home builders developing the ritzy Encanto-Palmcroft neighborhood put ads in newspapers nationwide, urging Easterners to come west and buy an ‘estate’ with an English Tudor– or Spanish Colonial–style home.
“Encanto Park was still a farm field. But big buildings—a new city hall and county courthouse, Hotel Westward Ho, the San Carlos Hotel and the Luhrs Tower—were springing up just a few miles away.
“Probably none was greeted with more fanfare than the Orpheum, built at Second Avenue and Adams by Harry Nace and J.E. Rickards....
“Newspapers called the $750,000 movie palace the most luxurious theater west of the Mississippi. Patrons lined up for blocks—not only for movies and vaudeville shows but for the theater’s chilled, purified air and an opportunity to see projected clouds and stars from what appeared to be the courtyard of a 15th-century Moorish palace.”