The Ontario Theatre's Many Past Lives

Located at 1700 Columbia Road, NW, in Adams Morgan, the former Ontario Theatre doesn’t look like much these days. It’s been a couple decades since it was a functioning theater. Most recently, there was a discount store in its old lobby, offering clothing, luggage, toys, you name it. The store went out of business in 2008. Just a few years earlier, the theater’s sleek original stainless-steel letters, spelling O-N-T-A-R-I-O across the roofline, were taken down, making it all the harder to recognize the building for what it used to be—one of the city’s classiest movie theaters.

The empty theater building in 2011. Photo by the author.