The Central Opera House: Everett's First Cinema

Downtown Everett has a lot to offer. Coffee, beer, groceries, music, books, comics, video games, baseball, banking; I don’t have to travel far to find it. Except for one thing: movies. Of course I could drive to the mall, but the mall can feel pretty out of the way.

Where is the cinema? Has there ever been a cinema? I went to the library to find out. I learned Everett is no stranger to the movies. In fact, Everett had 15 cinemas in its past. My next question was: what happened? Let’s start at the beginning, where the first film in Everett was shown over a century ago, the Central Opera House.

“There’s a popular anecdote about early film audiences cowering at the sight of an oncoming train on the screen.”

The Central wasn’t built as a cinema, in fact, it wasn’t a theater at all. Standing at 2919 Wetmore, the original building was a temporary warehouse for a dry goods market across the street. It served, bizarrely, as a roller rink and a cow barn before it was given a proper roof and a new face, turning it into Everett’s first “opera house” in 1894. It featured a lot of different attractions, plays, musicians, dancers, guest speakers (including Helen Keller and Eugene Debs), and the odd curiosity.

The Central Theater in 1912. // Courtesy of the Everett Public Library.

The arrival of a new curiosity was announced in the paper in February 1898. “Edison’s latest invention,” the Projectoscope, was on its way to Everett. It probably carried with it footage of recent world events and footage showing off the capabilities of the moving image. There’s a popular anecdote about early film audiences cowering at the sight of an oncoming train on the screen. The first film in Everett seems to have been less eventful than that, considering no one covered what was shown. Regardless, it set a precedent for the Central.

Film slowly became a regular part of it’s programming, although it never operated solely as a cinema. Movies were still rare and not a major form of entertainment.

The Central wasn’t in operation for very long. Over the course of 22 years the theater was known as the Central, the Orpheum, the Brandon, the Orpheum (again), Dreamland, Acme, Bailey, and finally the People’s Theater. But through all those name changes the top of the building always displayed “Central Theater”.

It burned down in 1916.

The Central Theater when it was known as the Acme. 1911. // Courtesy of the Everett Public Library.

Today the location of the Central is unoccupied. Two doors north of Narrative Coffee, the entrance is currently a parking lot. You can stand where the front door was, walk down to where the stage used to be, and you might end up in the exact spot where someone sat one hundred and twenty years ago watching the first movie ever shown in our town.

The Central may not have been the most beautiful cinema, or the most advanced, or longest running, but for Everett it was the first. It paved the way for many more movie theaters in the silent era and beyond, all of them now part of Everett’s history.