The Avalon Theatre, a Community Gem

It’s also a symbol of DC’s vibrant community spirit

This week I want to bring alive a particular piece of DC that’s well known around here but probably unknown to you. It’s not far from the Lafayette School, whose origins I wrote about a few weeks ago. This time, though, I’m writing about a neighborhood icon that has seen a lot of history and is now a local jewel.

BUT FIRST: I’ve written over the last couple of weeks (DC’s Economy Could be Facing a Recession and DC Chinatown) about the latest Congressional decision to run roughshod over our DC council. This time Congress voted not to allow us to “decouple” from the local tax implications of last year’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. However, our council chair, Phil Mendelson, had asserted that the Senate vote came too late for such disapproval, which is required within 30 days for a vote of this kind. For that and other reasons, our attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has now issued a legal opinion that the Congressional override is not binding, while DC’s chief financial officer, Glen Lee, has nevertheless issued city budget projections that assume Congress will win out. Still, it’s unclear whether DC will have to issue new local tax forms and require early taxpayers to refile. This is the kind of chaos that Congress seems to enjoy creating for those of us who live here.

Now for the fun stuff.

When I first moved to DC in the late 1970s, the city was full of movie theaters. My now-husband and I would often find ourselves on weekend evenings in a line extending down the street or wrapping around the corner, outside the Circle Theatre, the Outer Circle, the Biograph, or any number of other cinemas.

At the time, the Avalon, just south of Chevy Chase Circle on Connecticut Avenue, was one among many. First opened in 1923, it had started out screening silent films, with “The Prince and the Pauper,” starring Hungarian actor Tibor Lubinszky, as its first showing on February 28, 1923 – 103 years ago this past Saturday. At that time, it was known as the Chevy Chase Theatre, but after a few short years, in 1926 it was purchased by a local theater operator, Harry Crandall, in partnership with the Stanley Company of Philadelphia. In short order, they were bought out by Warner Brothers in 1929. That’s when the theater was wired for sound and renamed the Avalon. And – get this – the first talkie shown there was “The Wolf of Wall Street” (starring George Bancroft, not Leonardo DiCaprio!). The Avalon went through several more owners, becoming part of the local Circle Theatres chain for a time, until it finally was taken over by Loews in 1998, then very abruptly closed in 2001.

Let’s take a sidestep here. I mentioned at the beginning that I was writing about the same Chevy Chase DC neighborhood where Blacks were forced from their homes in the 1920s to make way for Lafayette School’s opening in the early 1930s, and I’m fairly sure that the Avalon in its early days followed typical practices of the Jim Crow era by segregating any Black moviegoers from the White moviegoing public. I didn’t find any details about this pertaining to the Avalon, but I did find that sometime in recent years, the Avalon had a special viewing of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” with a discussion after the showing about the “racism and discrimination occurring within the American film industry for much of the 20^th century.” Maybe at some point there will be more details about this history on the Avalon’s web page.

Getting back to 2001, Loews did more than close the Avalon. Before abandoning the place, they ripped out seats, movie screen and sound equipment, and just generally left the place in a mess. That got the neighborhood up in arms (yes, DC residents can be a rowdy bunch), and a band of activists led a huge fundraising effort, the Friends of the Avalon/Avalon Theatre Project, which succeeded after a year and half in reopening the theater as a nonprofit in 2003. Many in my area of town, and some living “over the line” in nearby Maryland as well, have been Avalon members for over twenty years, its small but cozy café and friendly longtime counter and ticket-taking staff contributing to its status as the anchor of social life along this cheerful commercial strip in upper northwest DC. In spite of the 2001-2003 hiatus (who knows how these things are decided?), the Avalon is now considered the oldest continuously operating movie house in DC, and the building has been owned by the Avalon Theatre Project since 2006.

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But what IS the Avalon, you may ask? Well, it isn’t a sleek, modern multiplex. The Chevy Chase Theatre was originally designed in what was called classical revival style, but in the late 1930s there was a substantial art-deco renovation. It all combined to earn the Avalon a historic landmark designation in 1995. Along the way, the upstairs that had once housed a music school, then a ballet studio, became a second, smaller theater in 1970, while in 1985 the large theater space on ground level acquired an eye-catching painting in its dome featuring the god Mercury, an angel and (naturally) a reel of film. In addition to both mainstream and less-known independent films, the Avalon is now known for its special Saturday programs for kids, featuring not only movies but also magicians and other live performers, as well as Wednesday evening special screenings of foreign-language films cosponsored by several embassies.

We have a special connection to the Avalon, since our house was built in the same year, 1923, and since the theater reopened in its current form in 2003, the same year that we moved back into our home after a renovation. We had bought our house the year after the dome mural was completed, and in the intervening years, before and since its phoenixlike reemergence, it’s been a special place for us and for so many others. Another sign of the sense of community that is so much a part of life in the real DC.

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https://51st.news/congress-dc-tax-bill-schwalb/

https://cfo.dc.gov/release/ocfo-releases-february-2026-revenue-estimates

https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/415

https://www.theavalon.org/about/

https://www.historicchevychasedc.org/local-institutions/avalon-theatre/

https://www.theavalon.org/films/do-the-right-thing/

https://www.npr.org/2006/03/01/5239254/memories-of-the-movies-in-segregated-america