Venue: Paramount Theatre
Town: Manhattan, US
Capacity: 3,664

The Paramount Theatre was a 3,664-seat movie palace located at 43rd Street and Broadway on Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Opened in 1926, it was a showcase theatre and the New York headquarters of Paramount Pictures. Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount predecessor Famous Players Film Company, maintained an office in the building until his death in 1976. The Paramount Theatre eventually became a popular live performance venue. The theater was closed in 1964 and its space converted to office and retail use. The tower which housed it, known as the Paramount Building at 1501 Broadway, is in commercial use as an office building and is still home to Paramount Pictures offices. Following the closing of the Times Square Paramount Theatre, two other theaters in Manhattan have had the same name: the Paramount Theatre at Madison Square Garden and a now-demolished movie theater at the Gulf and Western Building (15 Columbus Circle). The Brooklyn Paramount Theater, also in New York City, opened in 1928. The Paramount Theatre opened on November 19, 1926, with the gala premiere of Herbert Brenon's God Gave Me Twenty Cents, with guests including Mayor Jimmy Walker, Thomas Edison, Will H. Hays and Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. as guests. The stage gala was produced by John Murray Anderson. The theater housed one of the largest and most admired theater organs built by the Wurlitzer company. Designed for the famous organist Jesse Crawford, the organ was used for solos and to accompany silent films. The organ had 36 ranks of voiced metal and wooden pipes weighing a total of 33 tons. Crawford, who advised on the construction and installation of the organ, was the theater's featured organist from the 1926 opening until 1933. The organ continued to be played intermittently throughout the Paramount's history by George Wright and other noted organists. In 1959, a recording of Richard Leibert playing the Wurlitzer organ, Sing a Song with Leibert, was produced by Westminster Records.