Bagdad Theatre - 3/12 Kimball
Portland, Oregon
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Organ installation timeframe: 1927 - 1950's
 
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Bagdad Theatre
 

Bagdad Theatre c. 1944

The Bagdad Theatre originally had a Kimball theatre pipe organ installed in 1927 at a cost of $16,500.   As of 1998, the Bagdad Theatre building still exists. It is operating as the Bagdad Pub & Theatre which offers a unique "beer & bijou" combination. The McMenamin brothers started this concept in 1987 and it is rapidly being implemented in other parts of the country.

 
According to William Hansen, the Bagdad Kimball "...extended the top manual of a few speaking stops with every trap on the organ. Quite a waste of stopkeys. The [instrument] had a straight four rank tenor C chest for solo colors on the second manual and then one of those strange top manuals with the traps. Still it was a magnificent organ in that live house. It had eight rather minimally unified ranks in addition to the four rank straight chest. Oh, but what sounds!"
 
Bagdad Theatre, 3/12 Kimball Stop List courtesy Jim Stettner 2003
 

Kimball console in the theatre, date unknown
 

In the 1950's the organ was removed and placed in the private residence of Ted Marks.   In the early 1990's Ted's widow sold the organ. It was crated for shipment to a restaurant in Ontario, Canada. Unfortunately, the deal fell though and it remained packed in crates until 1993 when it was installed in a restaurant in Trenton, New Jersey.

Bagdad c. 1998

Console as currently installed in the Galaxy Theatre, Guttenberg NJ

In 1994, the organ was moved again. This time to the Galaxy Theatre in Guttenberg New Jersey, where it is played every Friday and Saturday night before the feature, and once a month on Saturday afternoon during the silent movie series.