The Chalet Theatre: how Enumclaw's last movie house outlived the other two

The first thing to know about the Chalet Theatre is that it is not on Cole Street. Everyone says it is. It is at 1721 Wells Street, one block west, just north of the Myrtle Avenue corner, with the police station for a neighbor. That small error tells you something true: the theater belongs to Cole Street in every sense except the postal one.

From the sidewalk you get a two-storey brick front, a band of maroon tile, a marquee, and a bank of white doors with round porthole windows. Above the marquee, apartments. Behind it, one screen.

A Legion hall with two birthdays

Ask when the building went up and you get two answers. The theater's own website, and the City of Enumclaw's visitor page, say 1917: built as a hall for the American Legion, and, in the theater's telling, "used as a manufacturing plant during World War II." The trouble is that the American Legion did not exist in 1917. It was founded in 1919. The other answer comes from the Black Diamond History blog, where JoAnne Matsumura's account of 1950s Enumclaw entertainment puts the Legion Hall at 1928, and from the Courier-Herald, which in April 2012 called the theater "85-year-old," which works out to 1927. Both dates are in play; the later one fits the Legion's own calendar.

The conversion is not in dispute, but its date is. The theater's site and Matsumura both say 1947. A 1948 issue of the trade paper Motion Picture Herald, quoted on Cinema Treasures by contributor Joe Vogel, lists "Roxy in Enumclaw, a 750-seat house, built this year." And Courier-Herald columnist Wally DuChateau wrote in January 2013 that the Roxy opened in 1949 with John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, a film that premiered on December 14, 1949. The likeliest reading is that work started in 1947 and the doors opened at the very end of 1949.

Opening just in time for the end

A 750-seat cinema opened in a town of a few thousand people in the same season the first television sets reached Puget Sound living rooms. HistoryLink puts the region's first wide-audience broadcast, a high school football game, on November 25, 1948, watched on nearly 1,000 sets around Puget Sound. Small-town theaters spent the next decade dying in the hundreds. Enumclaw had three, and within twelve years it had one.

The Liberty, at Wells and Myrtle, had shown the silents with a pipe organ installed in 1924, and it did not survive the Roxy's arrival. Matsumura records it demolished in January 1952; the police station stands on the site now, next door to the Chalet. The Avalon, a 1929 house on Cole Street near Myrtle, lasted until 1961, when it came down for a brick bank building. The newcomer was the one left standing.

Her account of what it took to hold the room in the fifties reads like a survival manual: Family Night for one dollar "regardless of the size of your family," the annual John Deere Day show, Technicolor in 1952, CinemaScope in 1954, a snack bar of peanuts, popcorn and ice cream bon-bons. It competed with the living room by being cheaper and bigger than a living room.

The Kerr years

In 1977 Ken Kerr and his brother bought the theater and, by Matsumura's account, gave it the Chalet name. Kerr was a social worker as well as a theater owner, according to the Enumclaw Patch, and he housed some of his staff in the apartments upstairs; one Cinema Treasures commenter remembers her parents living up there and the red velvet curtains below. The room held 582 seats when the Kerrs took it, per the Courier-Herald as quoted on Cinema Treasures. Kerr added Dolby sound, and in 1993 he pulled the original seats and reinstalled fewer of them, spacing the rows out for legroom, so the count now stands at 460.

The tapestries and murals stayed. The theater's site still lists "its original murals, tapestry, and fixtures" among the things it has not touched.

The winter the town tried to buy it

In April 2012 a group of residents formed a nonprofit, Chalet Arts Showcase Theater, to buy the building, keep the movies and add a bigger stage. Kerr told the Courier-Herald's Dennis Box he had "no desire to sell if the building would be used for an entirely different purpose." Seven months later he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died on December 7, 2012, and the Cascade Foothills Chorale's Christmas concert on his stage that weekend was dedicated to him.

DuChateau's column reports what happened next: the brother and nephew ran the place for about a month, then listed it, and the nonprofit, led by Jeff Coats, began raising money and pursuing a county landmark designation. Neither came to pass. The family kept it. The Better Business Bureau lists the business as a partnership under Charles Kerr, the nephew, from June 25, 2013; that same month, per Cinema Treasures, the theater went digital, with the 7.1 Dolby sound its website advertises today. The Chalet is not on King County's 2025 landmarks list, which for Enumclaw names only the Masonic Hall, the Municipal Building, the National Bank and the Expo Center. It survived the way it always has: privately, on ticket sales, without a plaque.

Then it outlived its last competitor. The Enumclaw Star Cinema, the single-screen house on Roosevelt Avenue, closed on March 16, 2020 for the pandemic and never reopened. Since then, if you want to see a film in Enumclaw, this is the building.

What it costs, read this week

The theater's pricing page, read September 14, 2026, lists an adult ticket at $8, children 12 and under at $5, seniors 62 and up at $5, and every ticket before 6 p.m. at $5. Popcorn runs $3 for a small to $6 for a jumbo, sodas $2.50 to $4, candy from $3, ice cream $4, and, because this is a single-screen theater that answers to nobody, a Philly cheesesteak, hot dogs and nachos at $4 each. Beer and wine are $6. Prices change without ceremony here; confirm at chalettheatre.com or on the theater's Facebook page before you go.

What a regular knows

One screen, and most nights one showing. The marquee in our photograph reads Toy Story 5 at 6:30 p.m.; the Courier-Herald's January 2024 calendar had Migration at 6:30 p.m. That is the house rhythm. The program lives on the marquee and on Facebook, not on the national showtime sites, which on Monday listed nothing at all for the Chalet. Gift cards are sold through Square.

The other half of the calendar is live. The theater bills concerts, stand-up and live sports on its screen, and on Thursday, September 24, 2026, a touring veterans' show, Salute to Comedy, takes the stage: doors at 6 p.m., show at 7, $20 in advance, free to veterans, active-duty military and first responders who RSVP with ID, per the Courier-Herald.

One block off Cole

Walk the block back to Cole and you are among the other survivors. The Enumclaw National Bank at 1602 Cole, built 1923, became a King County landmark in 2016. The Trommald Building at 1523 to 1525 Cole, a 1920 Heath and Gove design, has been on the National Register since August 24, 2000. The Historic Mint at 1608 Cole started across the street at Cole and Griffin and moved into its brick home after a fire. At Cole and Myrtle the building that replaced the Avalon still stands, which means both of Enumclaw's dead theaters have monuments: a bank and a police station.

The live one has a marquee. Three names, two birthdays, one family for nearly fifty years. Buy the $5 matinee; it is the reason the building is still here.