Woodburn's restored historic Bungalow Theatre brings new community enjoyment

Over its 110-year history, the Bungalow Theatre has been remodeled repeatedly.

After damage due to structure fires and being converted for a while into a call center and then a jewelry store, it's remarkable some remembered it had been a theater in downtown Woodburn.

Several years ago, the Bungalow Theatre was restored to its original use, but it was rarely used. Its interior still included antique wood seats, an antique projector and many original pieces like the lighting.

Though the city owned the theater and the adjoining Woodburn Museum, it hadn’t put much money into the building in its three decades of ownership.

But in the past seven years, the city has spent more than $1 million in grants and urban renewal funds to seismically retrofit the building to bring it up to modern standards. The theater has been modernized and it and the museum have become places people want to visit.

Oregon Main Street recently awarded the restoration of the Woodburn Museum and Bungalow Theatre the Bricks and Mortar Award for preserving and benefiting Woodburn’s Main Street district, and Restore Oregon awarded the city the DeMuro Award for saving a location it deemed endangered.

“It’s one of those spaces that we thought if we could kind of bring it back to a similar glory, it could be a very utilized space, a community space, and it actually has been, even more than it was initially,” Woodburn Community Services Director Jesse Cuomo said.

There are few event spaces in Woodburn, and although the Bungalow Theatre is small with 35 seats, it’s been getting lots of use since it officially reopened in January.

“I thought it would be a little slow rolling," Cuomo said. "But the library kind of manages the day-to-day of the space now, and they kind of program the heck out of it.”

The early years of the Bungalow Theatre

Some sources such as cinematreasures.com say the Bungalow Theatre was the first movie theater in Oregon, but it’s difficult to track its early years.

The building was constructed in 1894.

Most sources say it opened as a theater in 1911, but the first documented use of the name Bungalow Theatre came in 1914.

There were theaters in Woodburn starting in 1908 called the Star Theater, the Nickelodion and the Cozy Theater, according to newspapers from the time. But it is unclear whether they were just different names used for the Bungalow Theatre.

The Bungalow Theatre went through a series of owners, including William Gatchell, the Hanuska family, F.D. Sharp, Tracy Poorman, W.H. Dussler, Peter Koppinger and Irvin Westenkow.

The building was damaged in fires, remodeled several times and at one point showed movies for free to farmers on Saturdays.

Later, operators of the theater were limited in how much money they could make showing movies there because there were about 75 seats.

In 1949, Westenkow opened the Pix Theatre a few blocks away in downtown Woodburn with a capacity of 500 people. Westenkow had initially stated that he wanted to have both theaters in operation, but he closed the much smaller Bungalow shortly after opening the Pix.

The Bungalow became the hub for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph’s dial telephone system in 1952. It became Carters Jewelry in the 1960s and Pickering’s Dry Goods after a fire in 1972.

“Over the years there’s been a lot of remodelings in that space,” said Charlie Piper, whose family owned Piper’s Jewelry in downtown Woodburn.

“And then someplace along the line, I think when they were going through one of the remodels of the clothing store, when they were tearing up the floor for whatever reason, they noticed a slope in the floor from the front to the back (of the old theater floor).”

That slope was in people's minds when they decided to turn it back into a theater.

Becoming a theater again

A group of civic leaders from Woodburn, including then-Mayor Nancy Kirksey, formed a group that in 1986 started the Woodburn Museum next to the theater.

That group took over the Bungalow Theatre in 1991 and set about restoring it back to a theater.

Then-building owner Bob Sawtelle agreed to sell both the museum and theater to the city for $40,000.

It became the only movie theater left in the city after the Pix closed in the 1990s (the city purchased it in 2018 and demolished it in 2021). The Woodburn Drive-In closed in 1999.

Woodburn Mayor Frank Lonergan said developers looked at adding a multi-plex in Woodburn, but a dispute about parking with the City Council caused that company to instead build in Wilsonville.

For a few years, plays and old movies were shown at the Bungalow Theatre, but that was sporadic.

The building needed a lot of work.

The volunteer group running it, the Friends of Bungalow Theatre, did what they could, but the buildings needed seismic work and some people said it would have been easier to tear it down.

“Our little group, we had an auction and we showed a movie, 'Singin’ in the Rain,' we probably raised a few thousand dollars,” said Cindy Thomas, a volunteer with the Friends of Bungalow Theatre. “This was probably a drop in the bucket.”

In 2017, the city decided it needed to save the museum and movie theater.

It raised $1.05 million from a variety of sources, including $600,000 in urban renewal funds and grants from Oregon Cultural Trust, Energy Trust of Oregon, Oregon Heritage Museum and Oregon Main Street.

The city added accessible restrooms in the theater to serve both spaces. It installed modern movie theater seats in the theater but retained some of the older seats and other artifacts like signs and posters for decorations in the lobby.

And it preserved the art deco feel.

In the 1980s and 90s, businesses left downtown for spaces near Interstate 5 and Highway 99E or closed. The whole area was depressed.

“There was a lot of prostitution,” Lonergan said.

He points to the state’s Main Street program for helping many downtown businesses afford to make façade improvements and other streetfront improvements to draw visitors back downtown.

“People have to feel comfortable to come down there,” Lonergan said.

What the future holds for the Bungalow

The Bungalow Theatre won’t be showing first-run movies anytime soon. But it has been showing movies and having stage productions come into the space as much as possible.

“My job is when someone in the community says, 'We’re interested in doing something,' going, ‘Yes, how can we make that work?’” library manager Mike Jansen said.

The theater has hosted an accordion concert, a nonprofit symposium, poetry readings, a high school play and, of course, movies.

“We don’t have a ton of event space in town at this time,” Cuomo said. “Having just another option to hold some kind of gathering outside of your home is a nice thing to have at a cost that isn’t extreme.”

It’s difficult to hold first-run movies because there aren’t enough seats to make showing most movies profitable — but it did host a couple nights of the Michael Pena film "A Million Miles Away," as Amazon allowed it to be shown at no cost.

The Woodburn Museum is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, while the theater is open only for special events.

Bill Poehler covers Marion and Polk County for the Statesman Journal. Contact him at bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com

This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Woodburn's historic Bungalow Theatre gets a new chance at life