Apr 20, 2021 Pantages Theater Archive

By Luke Leither

In the Summer of 2020 Salt Lake City’s Redevelopment Agency (RDA) commissioned a local architecture firm, Modern Out West, to digitally preserve the historic Pantages Theater in downtown Salt Lake. The Pantages Theater, which was later renamed to The Utah Theater, was scheduled for demolition after the city determined it would be too costly to renovate. While there is still some uncertainty about the theater’s fate, the project moved forward and a team of architects, photographers, historians, and artists moved in to document the building’s current condition.

The completed “Pantages Archive” contains hundreds of pictures, some original drawings and watercolors, architectural plans, and even a 3d walkthrough of all eight floors.  The team also included a short, written history with historic newspaper articles and photographs to add context. Leah Donaldson and the rest of the Marriott Library’s web development group worked closely with Modern Out West to create a custom website to host all of the incredible content. The project was finished in late 2020 and the RDA subsequently donated the archive to the Marriott Library for preservation and distribution. It will take our teams some time to fully ingest everything into our collections. In the meantime, nearly everything can be viewed on the website hosted by the library: https://pta.lib.utah.edu.

The Marriott Library is honored to be the stewards of this collection and we hope you all enjoy this amazing effort at preserving our history.

Luke Leither | Assistant Head of Creativity & Innovation Services
Creativity & Innovation Services / Fine Arts & Architecture Library
luke.leither@utah.edu