Paramount Heritage Foundation

To serve the public with arts, entertainment, and community events in the most beautiful historic setting in Indiana. John Eberson started building this atmospheric theatre in 1928. It opened on August 20, 1929. We can relate to 1929 because our history and memory of 1929 was the Great Depression. John Eberson, and the country, ran out of money and... down-sizing of plans began. The Paramount was primarily built for vaudeville and movies, to escape the real world. The design was to give the illusion of a Spanish casa or villa complete with wrought-iron gates, statues, a ceiling painted like a sky with stars that really twinkled, and clouds projected onto the ceiling which slowly moved across the sky. Thousands of tiles in the original design of the lobby floor were set by hand and the terra cotta faade on the building facing was so detailed it merited its own blueprints. The entire complex was originally designed as a seven story hotel and theatre with a ballroom on the 7th floor. With down-sizing, the building stopped with three floors and the third floor is now the ballroom. There are 12 of these John Eberson atmospheric theatres left in the USA. Originally, there were 155. John Eberson also sold plans (around 1,500) for others to be built. Indiana has two of the 12 remaining theatres: The Embassy in Fort Wayne and the Paramount here in Anderson. The original owner was Publix Corporation. Local developers had planned to call the theatre The Palace. When Publix entered the picture, it became The Paramount and opened with that name. In 1985, the theatre closed for four years. By 1989, the complex had been owned by eight different groups and was actually facing the wrecking ball to become a parking lot. Three weeks before the last reading of the ordinance to tear down the Paramount, Leslie Davisson, a young lawyer with offices across the street, saw a program on TV about other theatres that had been saved. She called the TV station for the address, wrote to Washington, got a copy of the program, called a group of ...Read More