Overview

Auditorium in 1929

The 915-seat Paramount Theatre opened in the second half of 1929, built in the Atmospheric style with a Moorish theme, the auditorium being modeled after a walled Moorish courtyard.

The opening feature was Illusion (1929)  starring Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Nancy Carroll. The shallow vaudeville stage was separated from the audience by a small orchestra pit.

The theatre was built on the site of the Grand Theatre, opened as the Faribault Opera House in 1885, which was destroyed by fire in early 1929. William Glaser, operator of the theatre, immediately set upon plans to rebuild.

Jacob (Jack) J. Liebenberg, of Minneapolis architectural firm Liebenberg and Kaplan, announced two weeks after the loss of the Grand Theatre that the new theatre to be built on the site would be of a Moorish theme, characteristic of “Tunis of Algiers”. The theatre building would house five offices and two retail stores. In July 1929 the theatre construction project had the name of the Granada Theater attached to it.

A newspaper reporter described the auditorium in 1929 as “A vast square somewhere in Spain. Above, a star-lit sky. Around, a Spanish for [with] towering parapets, yawning grills. Battle, splendor, peace.”

From its opening the theatre was operated by the Publix Theatres chain, and the name seems to have changed to the Paramount Theatre by its opening judging by photos from 1929 showing the theatre’s large vertical sign.

Sometime in the 1930s, and certainly by 1937, the theatre’s name changed to the Paradise Theatre.

Auditorium in 2012

In 1956, the Paradise Theatre, along with Glaser’s other theatre the Village Theatre, was acquired by Dick Feichtinger. He subsequently undertook an extensive remodeling of the Paradise Theatre which may have included its twinning into two separate auditoria within the space of the original auditorium. Ultimately, the theatre closed in the early 1990s.

The building was extensively renovated in 2006 to include art galleries, classrooms, clay and textile labs, a gift shop and rehearsal spaces, in addition to the renovated auditorium seating around 300.

The Paradise Center for the Arts opened to the public in 2007. In 2008, the project received the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota’s  Restoration/Rehabilitation Award. In the same year a replica historic marquee was installed onto the theatre’s façade. The original 1929 auditorium is now called the Bahl Family Auditorium.