Chilliwack Museum Moment - The Paramount Theatre

Emblazoned with a fifty-foot sign and heralded as “Chilliwack’s first skyscraper” by the Chilliwack Progress, the Paramount Theatre opened to great fanfare in 1949. Complete with state-of-the-art seating and candy bar, the Paramount opened to a sold-out crowd of 900, with hundreds more lined up outside attempting to catch the Canadian premiere of “Sorrowful Jones”. The first ticket to the show was purchased by Barry Middleton of Vedder Crossing.

A landmark on the streets around Five Corners for 64 years prior to its demolition in 2013 and a magnet for Chilliwackians, the Paramount Theatre was the latest in a string of live performance and cinematic theatres to open at Five Corners. Other venues, such as the Chilliwack Opera House and the Lyric Theatre were completed much earlier between 1909 -1910, providing much needed space for theatrical and musical performances. Both of these businesses were renovated and later renamed, becoming the Strand and Imperial Theatres respectively as their businesses gradually shifted towards showing moving pictures and cinema films.

The closure and eventual demolition of the Paramount Theatre spelled the end of more than a century of continuous years of live or cinematic performances at the core of Chilliwack’s downtown social experience.

Learn more about the Paramount and Five Corners through the Five Faces, Five Corners: The Social Experience of Chilliwack’s Downtown exhibition at the Chilliwack Museum and Archives, located at 45820 Spadina Road. The exhibition will run until April 18, 2020.

Learn more about the current exhibit here: https://www.chilliwackmuseum.ca/exhibitions/current-exhibits/