Elsinore Theatre

This is what happens when a Portland attorney with a taste for drama decides to build a medieval castle in downtown Salem. That attorney was George Guthrie, and in the 1920s, he set out to build the finest entertainment venue between Portland and San Francisco. He hired architects to design the space in a Tudor Gothic style. For the unfamiliar, Tudor Gothic is an architectural revival of late medieval English manors, characterized by heavy masonry and steep arches, and Guthrie specifically wanted to recreate the castle from Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The lobby was designed to look like an English great hall with a starry night ceiling, and the stained glass above the doors was crafted from glass salvaged from a German cathedral bombed during World War I. But building a grand dream comes with a steep price. Guthrie initially budgeted 100,000 dollars, but construction costs violently ballooned to over 250,000 dollars, which is roughly 4.3 million dollars today. Local gossips were absolutely convinced Guthrie was driving himself straight into bankruptcy to finish his masterpiece. Despite the crippling financial anxiety behind the scenes, opening night in May 1926 was a triumph. A capacity crowd packed the nearly thirteen hundred seats to watch a silent film while the song Finlandia echoed from a massive Mighty Wurlitzer theater organ. But as we have learned on this tour, Salem's landmarks rarely sit peacefully, and the Elsinore soon faced its own eras of ruin. In 1962, the massive Columbus Day storm battered the city with ninety mile per hour winds, shredding the theater's iconic vertical blade sign and leaving the facade bare for decades. That same year, Guthrie's son removed the original Wurlitzer organ, sparking a bizarre odyssey where the instrument was housed in a barn, hauled around on tractor trailers, and eventually dismantled and sold for scraps. By 1980, the theater had degraded into a second-run cinema and was slated for the wrecking ball. Yet, much like the rescued fine art we saw championed by Mark Sponenburgh at the museum earlier, the people of Salem refused to let a cultural treasure vanish. A grassroots committee fought tooth and nail to buy and restore the venue. Local enthusiasts even installed a massive twenty-six rank pipe organ to replace the lost original. The community's stubborn ambition culminated recently in August 2025, when a towering twenty-three foot illuminated replica of the original blade sign was finally restored to the facade. Of course, the theater might still belong to its anxious creator. Performers frequently report seeing Guthrie's ghost watching rehearsals from the empty seats, or blame his spirit when stage props mysteriously move. If you want to look for him yourself, the lobby is generally open to peek into Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 2 PM.