Embassy Theatre

Joe Vogel on April 25, 2022 at 8:40 pm

The caption of a photo of Kelso’s City Hall om the Arcadia Publishing Company’s book Kelso says that the Embassy Theatre on Allen Street was demolished in 1939 to make way for the new City Hall. If there was still an Embassy Theatre in operation after that it must have been a different theater using the same name. The book makes no other mentions of the Embassy.

Our photo of the Embassy shows a very old building, and I suspect that it was the house listed in the 1910-1911 Cahn guide as the Kelso Theatre, a 777 seat, ground floor house with a 64 foot wide stage and 55 foot height to the rigging loft. The Embassy in the photo certainly looks to be the right size for that.

The September 28, 1907 issue of The Improvement Bulletin ran a notice datelined Kelso saying “[t]he Kelso Opera House Co. will receive bids until noon, Oct. 1st, for building a frame opera house. D. Nichols, architect, Vancouver.” (I’ve found a few other references to D Nichols in construction and architecture journals of the period, but I’ve been unable to find his first name.) The house wasn’t built until the next year, though, and the October 17, 1908 issue of The Billboard said that the Kelso Theatre would open about the middle of November.