History

Ashland was founded in the 1850s and named for Henry Clay’s estate outside Lexington, a gesture toward Kentucky identity in a city that was economically and geographically oriented toward the Ohio River system rather than the Bluegrass heartland. By the 1920s, Ashland Oil — founded in 1924 and headquartered in the city — and the steel industry had made the Tri-State region a significant industrial corridor, with a population large enough to support the kind of downtown entertainment infrastructure that mid-sized American cities built during the 1920s and early 1930s.

The Paramount’s opening in 1931 placed it in the first generation of sound-film cinemas — the conversion to talkies had happened in 1927-1929, and the theaters built or renovated in the early 1930s were designed from the outset for the new technology. The Art Deco styling was the standard vocabulary of the period’s entertainment architecture, applied here with a consistency of detail that suited the ambitions of a city that measured itself against the larger industrial cities of the Ohio Valley.

The subsequent decades followed the familiar trajectory of American urban cinemas: first-run house through the golden age, competition from suburban theaters and television, and eventually conversion to a performing arts venue. The Paramount Arts Centre role was established in the late twentieth century as the building found a second life as the region’s primary professional performance space.