History

Greensburg in the mid-1920s was a prosperous county seat at the center of one of Pennsylvania’s most productive coal and steel regions. Westmoreland County’s mines fed the Pittsburgh furnaces thirty miles to the west; the Pennsylvania Turnpike corridor had not yet been built, but the Pennsylvania Railroad’s mainline through the Laurel Highlands made Greensburg accessible and commercially active. A city that could support a Sears, a Woolworth, and a J.C. Penney on its main commercial street in 1926 could also support an entertainment palace — and the Palace Theater was built to occupy that position.

The design drew on the same sources that were producing theater buildings across American commercial districts: the Roman arch vocabulary of the Renaissance Revival, the gilded plasterwork that audiences had come to associate with theatrical quality, and the marquee as primary architectural element that announced the building’s purpose from the end of the block. In Greensburg’s case, the scale was calibrated to a county seat rather than a metropolitan center — a theater intended to serve as the cultural summit of its immediate region rather than to compete with the downtown palaces of Pittsburgh or Philadelphia.

The theater survived the transition from vaudeville to film, the mid-century decline of downtown retail, and the competition from multiplexes to emerge as Westmoreland County’s primary venue for live performance. The Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, which has presented seasons at the Palace since the mid-twentieth century, has been the building’s most important institutional tenant, giving it an identity as a classical music venue that distinguishes it from the pure commercial-entertainment history of many surviving theaters of this era.