#studio building

The Studio Building located at SW Taylor Street and SW 9th Avenue, 1964. City of Portland (OR) Archives, AP/29889. View this image in Efiles by clicking here.

Architecture in Portland, OR (No. 3)

In 1927, the Studio Building was the first of its kind in Portland – a nine-story building featuring 128 rehearsal studios for musicians and actors. Its attachment, now the Guild Theatre, was a 450-seat recital hall that brought civic theater to the heart of downtown.

The building is lined with original busts of famous composers. A 23½-foot-tall sign for ground-floor tenant Pastini juts from the corner.

The Studio Building and Guild Theatre were built to operate in tandem, but their uses changed quickly. Now, the Studio Building’s success comes at the Guild Theatre’s detriment.

The theater’s last tenant, the Northwest Film Center, operated in the space for eight years. Ted Hurliman of the Northwest Film Center called it “charmingly dilapidated.”

“The heaters were so loud when they came on that you’d have to crank the volume up on the movie,” Hurliman said. “And the seats were almost comfortable.”

The adjacent tower, on the other hand, has seven of its nine floors leased. Restaurant chain Pastini leased the ground-floor retail space in 2006.

“For lunch, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have basic business downtown,” Pastini co-owner Susan Bashel said.

For years, owner and theater tycoon Tom Moyer leased the Studio Building as an office complex, but gave the Guild Theatre to tenants for nearly nothing. In 1985, one of the Guild’s longtime tenants, Gary Fine, gave up his lease when light-rail construction started to hamper business. Moyer had already stopped charging rent, said theater historian Steve Stone, who worked with Fine at the theater.

The Northwest Film Center leased the theater for $1 per month from 1998 to 2006, when Pastini moved in next door.

When Pastini renovated its Studio Building space, workers knocked down a wall to discover a shared bathroom with the Guild.

“We were told, ‘It’s in your leasehold space. So go ahead and tear them out,’ ” Bashel said.

Without bathrooms, the Northwest Film Center, which occupied the theatre at the time, moved out. Crews with Hoffman Construction, employed by Moyer, briefly used the theater for offices while building the Park Block 5 Garage under Director Park. Otherwise, the theater has been vacant.

The fifth and sixth floors in the Studio Building are up for lease. The floors are each 3,950 square feet at $17 per square foot, full service. An upgrade of common areas, including a lobby and elevators, is planned for later this year.

Ninth Street separates the Studio Building from the recently completed Director Park. Fox Tower is a block east of the building, which has exposed ceilings and views from three sides inside.

No action is being taken to lease out the Guild Theatre. Tom Moyer’s company, TMT Development, did not return calls for comment on this story.

Some Studio-Building paintings of Edvard Munch :

Hodman on the Ladder, 1920.

Timbermen at Work on the Studio Building, 1920. 

Hodman at Work on the Studio Building, 1920

Hodman at Work on the Studio Building, 1920.

Building Workers in the Snow, 1920. 

Building Workers in the Studio, 1920

Bricklayers at Work on the Studio Building, 1920. . 

Carpenters in the Studio, 1920.

1927 was a curious time to open a new cinema in downtown Portland. Many local showmen were already fretting about an oversupply in the area, and a number of houses were doing poorly. Nevertheless, the newly opened Studio Building decided to convert the space that was originally used as a recital hall into a single-screen cinema, which they called the Taylor Street Theatre.

The Studio Building (1926 and still extant) was itself an interesting and rather unique facility - an apartment block designed specifically for actors and musicians, and included 128 purpose-built rehearsal rooms for their use. Its purpose was celebrated by the names and busts of famous composers that still decorate its facade.

The Studio Building and its cinema sat just outside Portland's main theatre district on Broadway, one block away. The Pantages Theatre, a vaudeville house, sat diagonally opposite (today, it is a Nordstroms department store), while the back entrance of the Fox Theatre (now the Fox Tower) led out onto the street opposite. The auditorium's unusual configuration meant that audiences entered from a door beside the screen, rather than from the back of the house as is more usual.

After a renovation and change of ownership in 1948 it became the Guild Theatre, a cinema that specialised in foreign and art house cinema. In more recent years, the Guild became a dedicated facility of the Northwest Film Centre.

Though the Guild does not quite make the criteria of remaining a working cinema, it was still in use as recently as 2006. Today, it is standing empty and in poor condition. Without the assistance of a kindly millionaire, it is unlikely to ever see business as a cinema again. Should it become a restaurant or store, original architectural elements from its heyday will inevitably be lost.