Byrd Theatre

When the Byrd Theatre opened in Richmond’s West End in 1928, talking pictures were arriving, but the new movie house still installed an instrument built for silent film. The Mighty Wurlitzer played to its first audience on Christmas Eve. Designed as a one-person orchestra, it could supply music, percussion, and sound effects from a room of pipes and mechanisms hidden within the building. The organ has remained in operation ever since.

The Byrd was conceived as a motion-picture palace: an ornate room designed to make an ordinary night at the movies feel like an event. Its opening came during a period when thousands of movie houses were built across the country. The theatre joined that national boom while giving Richmond an ambitious neighborhood venue, devoted to films rather than the vaudeville acts that had shaped earlier theatrical palaces.