Twin City Drive-In
1555 S. Gold Street,
Chehalis,
WA
98532
1555 S. Gold Street,
Chehalis,
WA
98532
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Kenmore is correct about Google Maps' Gold Street address, but that would only prove that the targeted building gets its mail from Chehalis. The businesses that actually border Gold Street show a Centralia address.
Google Maps continues to indicate that the Centralia city limits include the old Twin City site. Since the drive-in was historically associated with Centralia, it’s a shame to need to search Chehalis to find it.
A closer address is 1555 S Gold St, Chehalis, WA.
Google Maps has updated their addresses and this puts it right on the property.
The ramps have been obliterated. Seems from the street views that dirt may have been dumped on the property (not uncommon). But the outline, pieces of the screen and projector booth/concession stand foundations, and part of the entrance is still present.
https://tinyurl.com/ypcjw8c9
Believe it or not, HALF the ramps and some of tne acreen, concession and box office foundations are still there! 😇😇😍😍
Google Maps says that the site is now within the Centralia city limits. Maybe that’s accurate.
Boxoffice, Feb. 17, 1951: “Ed Auer and Howard Barber, both of Seattle, have sold their Twin City Drive-In Theatre located between Centralia and Chehalis. Buying the showcase were the three Gamble brothers, Ron, Roy and Williard of Centralia, Wash. The sale price was estimated at $80,000. The outdoorer is slated to be improved and reopened in the spring”.
Sometimes the theater is listed as being in Chehalis. It is on the border between Centralia and Chehalis.
The Twin City Drive-In In Centralia, Unfortunately I Cannot Find The Opening Date To This. But The Earliest Information I Can Find Dates Back As A Sponsor From October 1950.
In February 1951 Just Before Its Reopening For The Season, Police Reported A Robbery At The Twin City That $1,000 And A couple Of Items Were Stolen.
I have added a hand drawn map that I made of the property layout to the photos page for this theater.
I have Duke Rorda’s phone numbers. Email me at
I actually was able to locate the marquee through a gentleman named Duke Roorda (I think) and had arranged to recover it from him. In-time I lost his contact info, but if anyone knows of his whereabouts let me know!!!!
My family owned this great Drive-in during the 70’s. On the weekends we would stay the night at a motel and work the different shifts available. My Mom, sisters, and grandmother made and sold food. My brother and I would walk the grounds with walk talkies looking for people sneaking in. Dad was stuck with the paperwork. I used to collect all of the expired movie posters and still have most of them which I love!
Great memories of a tradition lost.
Arthur Allen’s “Drive In Theaters of Western Washington” website had tons of drive in theater pictures. Unfortunately, it was hosted on GeoCities and disappeared several years ago. A mirror of it is here with some additional pictures of the Twin City Drive-In theater:
http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/Pavillion/2216/TwinCity.html
Granted, not all of the pictures got archived, but lots of information is still there.
Around 1995, James Jack started painting the outside of the building in yellow color to doll up the place and hide the graffiti. You can see some of the yellow painted portions of the building in some of the pictures. The paint that was on the building in the late 70’s and in the 1980’s was a light green.
really nice pictures! thanks for sharing!!
Thanks to Ken and Jack O. from the Rodeo for telling me about the Twin City. My first stop was in 2000, relatively still intact. After the marquee was removed in ‘02, I stopped my visits because I would see transients hanging around the box office, which eventually burned down. By 2005, the county decided to raze the property and fence off the perimeter. You can still see some of the pavement for the main entrance and exit lane coming out of field one.
In 1993 it was already closed, but a man by the name of James Jack was starting to clean things up and had plans to reopen it. Unfortunately, I heard that he had suddenly passed away and the theater would never reopen. There were a couple of brothers who had opened the theater in 1984 and 1985 seasons, but they didn’t know how to operate a drive-in theater and it closed. One of their biggest problems was sound system failures. They had no radio sound at all and were running the sound through the traditional in-car window speakers on both screens. Instead of simply repairing the existing RCA drive-in theater tube amplifier (which was designed for this theater anyway), they bought like five or six Bogen transistorized amplifiers and used those to feed sound to the speakers. That turned out to be a big mistake because the line transients in the field wiring played havoc with the output transistors in the Bogen amplifiers. Seems like every couple of weeks several of the amplifiers were in the repair shop with blown output transistors. So the sound was pretty bad which drove away customers. If this theater would have been twinned properly (not hacked like it was) and that second screen had radio sound, this theater might still have been open in my opinion.
Thanks for all the pics for this theater, Ken! Was it still operational in 1993 or already closed at this point?
The only remnants of the theater today is the asphalt driveway entrance and many of the original trees are still standing. The property is now owned by the Western Washington Fairgrounds and is used for storage. The front entryway of the theater now has a barbed wire fence stretched across it. The entire theater marquee and readerboard have been completely removed.
I have plenty of pictures of this theater in my collection. All my pictures were taken after the theater closed and had been through a couple of major floods.