Walk past 415 Main this week and you'll see the marquee lit for a film about theaters like it dying. That's not an accident. Rick Steves timed his purchase of the Edmonds Theater to land in the same week the single screen is showing "The Last Picture Shows," a documentary about small-town cinemas going under, because as he put it, the movie explains exactly why he bought the building underneath it.
The announcement came this past Tuesday, Aug. 25, in a Facebook video that opened with Steves ringing a gold bell. "Fun news: I just bought the Edmonds Theater," he said. By Wednesday it was national travel news. By the weekend it was the top comment thread on every local site in Snohomish County. What most of the coverage missed, because outside reporters parachute in for one story and leave, is that this isn't an isolated act of hometown generosity. It's the third or fourth move in a pattern that's been building on this four-block stretch of downtown for years, and the theater purchase only makes sense once you see the other pieces already in place around it.
The Theater the Family Couldn't Save
Start with what almost happened instead. The Edmonds Theater opened in 1916 across the street as the Union Theater, relocated to its current Main Street address in 1923, and took its present name when dentist Jacque Mayo bought it in 1979. Mayo ran it for three decades until his death in 2009, after which his children inherited a single-screen, century-old building that is, by the economics of modern moviegoing, a losing proposition even without deferred maintenance on a vintage structure.
Mayo's daughter Stephanie described the years after the pandemic plainly: the family was "just putting money in and trying to keep the doors open." Current manager Justin Pritchett kept the day-to-day going through that stretch, and when Steves' purchase finally closed, Stephanie Mayo called it the best thing that could have happened to the place. That's not a family cashing out. That's a family relieved someone showed up before the math ran out.
Steves has his own history with the balcony. He's talked about sneaking up there with a girlfriend in 1975, and he wrote a column for The Daily Herald back in 2020 arguing the theater was a community treasure worth protecting long before he had any legal claim to it. He's since said he wants to invest in restoring some of the building's Art Deco character rather than change how it runs day to day. Pritchett stays on. The regular mix of first-run films and family showings continues. What changes is who's absorbing the risk of an old single-screen building in a streaming era.
The Pattern Underneath the Purchase
Here's the part that gets lost if you only read this as one man's nice gesture. In the past nine months alone, Steves also seeded the Lynnwood Neighborhood Center, which opened in early 2026 on land he donated to his church, and in December 2025 he bought the building housing a Snohomish County hygiene center after its landlord moved to sell, telling the staff there they could keep using the space for free. Three purchases, three different kinds of civic infrastructure, one person deciding that if the market wouldn't sustain something the neighborhood needed, he'd absorb the cost himself.
That's the real story: downtown Edmonds is being stabilized building by building, mostly by people who already live within walking distance of what they're saving.
You can see the same instinct, minus the philanthropy, in how the corner of 6th and Main filled in. Developer Mike McMurray bought that half-acre lot in 2017 specifically because he'd heard it might get bulldozed for condos, and Main Street Commons took years to lease up completely. By this year it finally has all six spaces occupied, and the mix says something about who's willing to bet on this particular four blocks:
- Molly Moon's, the Seattle ice cream chain's tenth location
- The Crumpet Shop, a longtime Seattle name putting down a second root here
- Johnny Mo's Pizzeria, running a Chicago-versus-New-York pizza rivalry under one roof
- Virtue Cellars, a tasting room for wine made a few miles away in Richmond Beach
- Stillhouse Coffee, opened by Brian Eastland, who spent years roasting beans out of the house he shares with his wife and six kids before finally getting a lease
- The Victor Tavern, chef Ethan Stowell's third location of the concept, occupying the old 1954 Thriftway grocery building
None of that is a chain filling empty square footage on a spreadsheet. It's operators with existing ties to this specific town choosing to plant something permanent here, the same logic that led Steves to buy a movie theater instead of just donating to keep the lights on.
Now watch it happen again. Niles Peacock, the group that already runs a pizza parlor near the Edmonds waterfront, is expanding into an all-day bagel concept called Rooster at 515 Main, expected to open around Labor Day weekend. Same operator, same four blocks, betting the appetite for a second location is already proven by the first.
Catching the Documentary This Week
If you want to see what actually prompted this, the free celebration screening on Aug. 31 sold out fast, but "The Last Picture Shows" is still running through Sept. 3, with regular showtimes at 4:45 and 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 2:30, 4:45 and 7 p.m. on the weekend. Tickets are through the theater's own site, and it's worth seeing the film that gave Steves his opening line before it's gone, especially given the theater's own recent run of sold-out Throwback Thursdays and bigger releases like "The Odyssey" and "Spider-Man: Brand New Day."
The Rest of September Downtown
The calendar doesn't slow down once the documentary clears the marquee. The Classic Car & Motorcycle Show takes over the streets of downtown on Sept. 6, with more than 250 cars and motorcycles on display from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The Rotary Club's Oktoberfest Family Festival follows the weekend after, running Friday, Sept. 11 from 3 to 10 p.m. and Saturday, Sept. 12 from noon to 10 p.m. And the Third Thursday Art Walk returns Sept. 17, the same grassroots gallery crawl that's been running monthly, rain or shine, for years. You can track exact hours and any last-minute changes through Explore Edmonds' events calendar.
None of these events depend on the theater news to matter. But they're happening on the same handful of blocks, run by the same overlapping cast of Chamber volunteers, Downtown Alliance members and longtime residents who keep showing up to fund the next thing themselves rather than wait for someone else to. That's the actual character of this stretch of Edmonds right now: less a single feel-good headline and more a neighborhood quietly deciding, business by business and building by building, what it's willing to keep.
If you've been in Edmonds long enough to remember when that corner at 6th and Main was still a construction fence, this week is worth paying attention to. The theater outlasting a family that loved it and a pandemic that nearly finished it is the kind of thing you only notice was fragile after someone else has already fixed it.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Main Street is actually worth, given everything reinvesting into it right now, Davey Wilde can walk you through it. Work with Davey Wilde for a straight read on the Edmonds market, whether you're already living two blocks from the marquee or thinking about getting there.
