Atlas Theater and Shops - View this location on map The Atlas Theater and its adjacent row of six shops form one of the city s best examples of a neighborhood movie house. Built in 1938 at the height of the city s boom in neighborhood theater construction, the air-conditioned, 1000-seat theater and its distinctive shopfronts exemplify the type of convenient modern facility that gradually began to supplant the old downtown movie palaces. The building was designed by John Jacob Zink, the finest and most prolific theater architect in the Mid-Atlantic states during the 1930s and 1940s. The Art Moderne facades are executed in limestone, black glass, and aluminum, with streamline and zigzag decorative motifs. The composition is dynamically asymmetrical from a pivot point at one end, the triple-panel theater frontispiece, streamlined marquee, and projecting lighted sign form a Cartesian geometry of intersecting planes in three directions. The series of sleek one-story storefronts extends the streamlined composition in a long horizontal of black glass and aluminum panels enframed by limestone pilasters and cornices. 1313 H Street, NE, Washington , DC Historical

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