Commodore Theatre
Commodore Theatre is an historic movie theater located at Portsmouth, Virginia. It was built in 1945 in the Streamline Art Deco style, and originally sat 1,000 people. The theater closed in 1975 and sat empty until a change in ownership and extensive renovation beginning in 1987. It reopened two years later, and was in operation displaying first-run films accompanied by a full kitchen. History The Commodore was built in 1945 by William Stanley Wilder, a Portsmouth native who owned and operated several theaters in Virginia's Tidewater region from the 1920s through the 1940s. The theater was named after Commodore James Barron, an officer on the frigate USS Chesapeake involved in the ChesapeakeLeopard affair and who is buried in a churchyard next to the theater. It is rumored that the construction supplies for the building which ordinarily would have been unavailable due to wartime shortages were allocated to the project due to the entertainment it would provide to the large number of soldiers stationed in Portsmouth. The theater's design has been described as "an excellent example of the Streamline Art Deco style." Its two-story façade features a plain mass of yellow pressed brick decorated with horizontal stripes of brown brick on