Louis Grell and the Toledo Paramount Theatre — Now Seen in Full Color

The walls and ceilings shown here were designed and hand-painted by Louis Grell and his team of assistants. Period color photographs from the early 1960s now reveal the extraordinary richness of Grell’s work inside the Toledo Paramount Theatre—vivid reds, greens, oranges and blues that black-and-white photographs could never fully convey.

The Toledo Paramount opened to a packed house on February 16, 1929. Paul Spor, dressed in a white military uniform, served as master of ceremonies. Music filled the enormous theater, with Wilye Stahl conducting the Toledo Paramount orchestra and Dwight Brown performing on the mighty Wurlitzer organ. The opening feature was Redskin, starring Richard Dix.

The theater was part of the expanding Publix theater organization associated with Paramount Famous Players-Lasky of New York, Adolph Zukor and Sam Katz of Chicago’s Balaban & Katz. Designed by the Chicago architectural firm Rapp & Rapp, the Toledo Paramount joined the great American movie palaces being constructed during the final years of the 1920s.

Construction was reported to have cost approximately $2.3 million, exclusive of the land, with another reported $200,000 devoted to interior decoration and original artwork. Even before the theater opened, the Toledo Blade recognized the extraordinary ambition of its interior. In December 1928 the newspaper described the art objects planned for the building as making it a “veritable museum of art treasures” and said its decorative effects would represent “the ultimate in interior design.”

Grell’s Painted Interior

Like many Rapp & Rapp movie palaces, the Toledo Paramount carried its patrons through a carefully staged sequence of increasingly elaborate spaces. From the busy downtown street, visitors entered a grand lobby nearly 100 feet long, lined with mirrors surrounded by Grell’s painted decoration. Beyond it opened the theater’s expansive rotunda and foyer.

Here Grell’s contribution was architectural in scale.

The walls and ceilings of the Grand Lobby and Rotunda were designed and hand-painted by Grell and his assistants. Swirling and looping ornament connected classical figures, architectural elements and landscape scenes across the surfaces of the rooms, turning walls and ceilings into a continuous decorative environment.

The overall scheme was modeled on the Villa Madama in Rome, with its Renaissance decoration inspired by the ancient Roman paintings then associated particularly with Pompeii. For Grell, the vocabulary would have been familiar. After completing his studies in Munich, he spent part of his European period traveling and working in Italy before coming permanently to the United States.

The newly available color photographs make this aspect of Grell’s work much easier to understand. What appears restrained and almost monochromatic in surviving black-and-white photographs was originally an intensely colored architectural environment of reds, greens, oranges and blues.

The Toledo Blade offered another assessment on December 17, 1928, while the building was nearing completion:

“those who have the opportunity to view the theatre can get an idea of the beauty that is to be and the immensity of the new house…The theatre will be as elaborate as the Michigan in Detroit and will be one of the finest of the entire Publix chain.”

Painting on an Architectural Scale

The Toledo Paramount demonstrates a side of Grell’s career that is difficult to appreciate from easel paintings alone. He was working not simply on individual canvases but across entire architectural interiors, designing painted schemes that had to function with the proportions, sightlines and ornamental program of enormous public rooms.

Projects of this scale required a studio operation. Grell employed assistants for his largest mural commissions—reportedly as many as eight—and major projects could occupy the studio for months. Comparable examples of his large-scale architectural painting survive or are documented at Chicago’s Gateway Theatre and Assumption Catholic Church.

At Toledo, the result surrounded the theater patron. The painting was not something encountered as a single framed object on a wall. The room itself became the artwork.

A Lost Movie Palace

The Toledo Paramount operated from February 1929 until September 1965. Before demolition, its furnishings were dispersed at auction. After only thirty-six years, the building and Grell’s enormous painted interior were destroyed.

The Paramount was also distinctive within the Publix chain for incorporating the city’s name—TOLEDO—directly into its marquee design.

For decades, Grell’s interior was known principally through black-and-white architectural photographs. The surviving early-1960s color photographs now restore something those images could not: the actual visual character of the rooms Grell created.

Nearly a century after Grell and his assistants painted them, the Toledo Paramount’s lost walls and ceilings can once again be seen in color.

Louis Grell and studio assistants
Decorative mural and ceiling program, Toledo Paramount Theatre
Oil-painted architectural decoration, 1928
Installed before the theater’s opening, February 16, 1929
Destroyed following the theater’s closure in 1965

Image credits: Color and black-and-white interior photographs courtesy of the American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America. Color photographs date from the early 1960s.