Walt Lockley

The Bagdad Theater is the anchor of the Hawthorne strip on the east side of Portland.

This section of Hawthorne is a classic kind of five-block university district, with venerable bookstores and scruffy beggars and coffee houses and cheap Chinese restaurants in rehabbed brick buildings, copy shops, thrift stores, boutiques, funky studenty housing on the second stories. This is exactly like the Loop in St. Louis next to Washington University, or that stretch of 45th Street north of the UW campus in Seattle or that stretch of Route 66 (Central Avenue) through Albuquerque, or three dozen others across the country.

Hawthorne is an especially classic kind of university district, because Portland mysteriously still has civic stuff that disappeared elsewhere about 15 years ago: telephone poles bulging with band posters stapled over each other, apparently thriving record stores, and full-size coffin-style glass phone booths. The only problem is, there's no university around here. Hm.

In any case, like the Neptune Theater close to UW, like the Tivoli in the Loop, there's a beloved studenty movie theater on Hawthorne. That's the Bagdad.

Facts: the Bagdad opened in 1927, credited architects Thomas and Mercier, who were also responsible for two other theaters in Portland (the Oriental and the Blue Mouse), the McDonald in Eugene, and the Egyptian in Coos Bay. Seats 700. Shows second-run movies. Healthy business. Well-loved.

There's not much that's authentically Iraqi about the exterior of the Bagdad, to put it mildly. It's more Italian Renaissance / Spanish Colonial / vague Mediterranean with that red tile roof and blind arches. Even the neon sign doesn't date to the initial build, but it's eye-catching and the rounded marquee sure as hell owns that corner. It says "Bagdad" and some part of you just accepts it, wants to believe it despite the evidence.

Notice the Bagdad has a fly tower, a tipoff that it was conceived as a legitimate theater. A purpose-built movie house only needs a back wall. This also means there is, or was, a complete stage, a warren of dressing rooms and storage and maybe a covered-over orchestra pit.

As exotic movie palaces go, the Bagdad counts as a well-preserved mid-sized neighborhood exotic. The 1920s movie palaces fall into rough categories: the atmospherics, with asymmetrical side walls of the auditorium built to resemble the exterior walls of an Italian village, say, with twinkling lights in the skies and maybe passing clouds overhead if the Brenograph was working that night; the straightforward opulent houses where the design was supposed to signal high-minded refinement, gilt and red velvet and putti, like an opera house updated to the standards of showy terra cotta workmanship and the "classy" murals of 1925 or so; and then the exotics, where design elements from "Egypt" and "Morocco" and "Persia" and "Spanish Baroque" were wedged in together, stacked on top of each other in a six-way pileup, extruded through a press agent's withdrawal nightmares, and so on, you see what I mean.

The exotic theaters tended to be poured concrete structures. Concrete was relatively new in the 1920s, cheap, and amenable to whatever exotic architectural fantasy you might want impose on it. Concrete could give you big free-span spaces and cantilevered balconies, playful spatial effects like barrel vaults and curving ramps and complicated apertures without a lot of engineering, and, hell, minarets, if you want minarets. Plus, being ugly as hell if left untreated, concrete needed some kind of decoration.

The Bagdad is certainly poured concrete. Check out around back -- check out those tell-tale horizontal striations, still showing the woodgrain and the marks from the formwork the concrete was poured into, looking even more archeological than it really is.