The Cinema Was Still There

5th Avenue Cinema
Portland State University — Portland, Oregon
Saturday, May 9, 2026 | 10:15am

Before heading toward Keller Auditorium for The Phantom of the Opera, I walked north through the Portland State University campus and passed the 5th Avenue Cinema on SW Hall.

The theater sat quietly in the late morning light. Cars moved normally through downtown traffic while The Juniper Tree stretched across the marquee above the entrance in black block lettering.

A Movie Madness video drop box stood beside the doorway. Posters lined the long windows facing the street. Reflections of trees, apartments, and passing vehicles drifted across the glass without interrupting the stillness of the building itself.

The 5th Avenue Cinema never felt separated from Portland. That has always been part of its identity. It exists directly within the rhythm of downtown rather than outside it — a student-run repertory theater quietly operating beside classrooms, sidewalks, buses, and ordinary city movement.

Visitors young and old moved between the PSU Farmers Market and the surrounding sidewalks nearby in the South Park Blocks. Nothing about the theater announced itself as historic or nostalgic. It simply remained present.

Outside the entrance, The Juniper Tree — a 1990 black-and-white Icelandic folk tale starring a young Björk — played beneath a marquee that has likely introduced decades of Portland State students to repertory and independent cinema.

Hours later, crowds would gather farther south along Broadway for The Phantom of the Opera at Keller Auditorium. But standing outside the 5th Avenue Cinema beforehand felt like encountering another side of Portland’s arts culture entirely — smaller, quieter, and woven directly into the everyday fabric of the city.

The cinema was still there.