People walk underneath the marquee of the Chehalis Theatre on North Market Boulevard on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Chehalis.
Connor Tucker, a business partner of Daryl Lund, walks through the Chehalis Theatre on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Chehalis. Lund, who owns the building, is looking to sell the theatre in the near future.
An array of letter used for the marquee at the Chehalis Theatre are stacked on a table on the balcony of the downtown Chehalis movie theatre on Wednesday afternoon.
The interior of the Chehalis Theatre is seen from the balcony on Wednesday afternoon in Chehalis.
Film for trailers is seen stacked up in the projector room of the Chehalis Theatre on Wednesday afternoon in Chehalis.
The interior of the Chehalis Theatre is seen from the balcony on Wednesday afternoon in Chehalis.
The inside of the Chehalis Theatre is seen on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Chehalis.
Connor Tucker, a business partner of Daryl Lund, walks through the Chehalis Theatre on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Chehalis. Lund, who owns the building, is looking to sell the theatre in the near future.
The building the Chehalis Theater calls home has lived as an auto dealership, video store flea market and more. Now the 91-year-old building waits for someone to write the next chapter on one of downtown Chehalis’ most recognizable structures.
Daryl Lund bought the Chehalis Theater in 1994, but now he’s ready to part with it. As such, he has listed the building for sale at the asking price of $299,000.
It’s something he’s somewhat emotionally reluctant to do, but in all practicality he knows it’s been unused since at least 2008 — the same time the Midway Theatre moved in up the street at the Lewis County Mall. That signaled the theater’s end as the Twin Cities’ first choice for first-run movies. It’s not one of Lund’s fondest memories, but it certainly doesn’t resonate greater than some of his favorite moments in the downtown Chehalis moviehouse.
“I remember watching ‘The Hiding Place’ in there, oh, I can’t remember when it was —” Lund looked up the date of the movie’s release, finding it was in 1975 — “was it really that long ago?”
The Chehalis city councilman and movie fan’s youth was intertwined with the theater, perhaps the biggest reason he bought the building in 1994. As a senior in high school, he learned how to run the theater’s projection system from a friend’s father — that is, “until the union found out about it,” he said with a laugh.
When Lund first owned the Chehalis Theater, the building was rather ironically home to a video store, offering movies for people to play on the small screen rather than the large one inside the building. But Lund, after a few years of other uses such as a flea market, reopened it as a movie theater in 1999 and scored a coup when it played the first Star Wars movie to be released in nearly two decades.
“We put digital sound in here and that’s how we got ‘The Phantom Menace,’” Lund recalled. “I think that was about the same time we put new seats in. I just remember a lot of people were here, so many we had to turn a bunch of ‘em away.”
The memories Lund shared are just that, however, as the screen hasn’t lit up for a movie to be shown publicly in more than five years. It’s the lack of activity in the building that spurred Lund to put it on the market last week.
“I just want to get rid of it,” Lund said, disappointment echoing in his voice. “When I closed it, the real estate crunch was kinda hitting so I figured I’d hold onto it a few years.”
Lund bought the theater for $60,000 in 1994, and says he’s paying about $1,500 per year on insurance for the building. Taxes are “at least that,” Lund says, and payments to the bank have totaled about $900 per month.
A trip through the upper floors of the building reveal some of its history: the old projector sits intact as some of the final reels of movie trailers to be delievered to the building — the 2008 version of “I Am Legend” among them — sit untouched. Lettering used on the marquee outside sits in rows on a table just behind the balcony seating area.
With several areas of the theater in need of an upgrade and such little activity taking place, including a now-off-the-table idea for the Chehalis Community Renaissance Team to take ownership of it, offering it to someone with an idea to revamp the theater seemed like the best option for Lund.
“The ideal thing I’d like to see is for it to stay as a theater,” Lund said.
Real estate brokers Kristine Redford and Paul Strawn, of Riley Jackson Real Estate of Olympia, joined Lund Wednesday for an interview with a Chronicle reporter. Redford in fact had visited the theater in her younger years and acknowledged a sentimentality to the building.
“I used to visit here and sit in the balcony when I’d see a movie,” Redford said. “We stopped here recently to take some pictures to put on our website, and we talked to a lot of people who were excited about it.”
Strawn said the theater reminded him of one in Hood River, Oregon, that maintained its architectural integrity and historic charm, and hoped the Chehalis Theater could become a similar venture under new ownership.
“My children always ask can we go back to Hood River to see a movie,” Strawn said. “There was something about it, not just the movie, that made them want to go back. This could be that kind of place.”
