The 5th Avenue Theatre

This guide to the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle opens beneath a carved five-toed dragon, a symbol Chinese law once reserved for the emperor alone, set into the ceiling of a nineteen twenties movie palace. It follows designer Gustav Liljestrom, a Norwegian artist who built an entire imperial fantasy from a nineteen twenty-five German book of temple drawings, through the theater's opening night in nineteen twenty-six and its slow decline into a nineteen seventy-eight closure. Developers then pitched turning the dragon-ceilinged hall into a restaurant, a multiplex, an office block, even a shopping center, with the city unable to landmark it because the land belonged to the University of Washington. Listen for the dragon still facing down the audience below.