Parking near the Saenger Theater in Mobile, AL.

When Mobile’s Saenger Theatre opened on January 19, 1927, it was the sixty-first Saenger Theatre. There were Saenger Theatres located throughout the South as well as in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Hailed as, “Alabama’s Greatest Showplace” and, “the most beautiful playhouse in all of Dixie,” the Mobile Saenger Theatre took a year to construct at a cost of about 500,000 dollars. Designed by renowned architect, Emile Weil, the Mobile Saenger Theatre featured the following: three-color auditorium lighting, a two-manuel, ten-rank Robert Morton theatre organ, full stage facilities to accommodate large road shows including stage and wardrobe traps, four floors of dressing rooms, musicians’ and chorus rooms and 2,615 seats. Around 1950, the seats on the floor were replaced and re-spaced, reducing the seating capacity to about 2,200. Seating capacity today is 1,921.