History

Bellingham in the 1920s was a consolidated city — four separate towns (Whatcom, Sehome, Bellingham, and Fairhaven) had merged in 1903 — with a mixed economy of salmon canneries, coal shipping, and lumber. Commercial Street was the downtown spine, and the new theater was positioned at its heart. The building opened in the silent film era; the arrival of sound two years later required technical retrofitting, as it did for theaters nationwide. The ornate interior, designed in the Moorish and Spanish Colonial idiom that Hollywood had popularized through its own theater construction, cost significantly more per seat than a plain house would have — a deliberate signal that Bellingham’s civic ambitions matched those of larger Pacific Coast cities.

The theater survived the Depression, the transition to television, and the multiplex era through a combination of its central location, its scale (the main auditorium holds well over a thousand people), and the loyalty of a community that found in it a civic gathering place beyond its function as entertainment. Restoration campaigns beginning in the 1990s addressed the building’s structural condition and recovered much of the original ornamental plasterwork. Today the Mount Baker Theatre Foundation manages the venue as a regional performing arts presenter, hosting touring Broadway productions, orchestral concerts, dance companies, and community events.