The Roseland Theater, sometimes called the Roseland Theater and Grill, is a music venue located at 8 Northwest Sixth Avenue in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, in the United States. The building was originally a church, constructed by the Apostolic Faith Church in 1922. In 1982, Larry Hurwitz converted the building to a music venue called Starry Night. In 1990, the club's 21-year-old publicity agent was murdered in one of the theater's hallways; Hurwitz was convicted for this murder ten years later. Hurwitz sold the club in 1991, claiming he had lost support from the local music industry. The venue was given its current name during the 1991 ownership transfer. During the 1990s, Double Tee acquired control of the hall's operations, then purchased and renovated the building.
The theater features a standing-only main floor and an upstairs balcony with an adjacent bar. Peter's Room, an intimate showcase venue with a 400-person capacity, includes a restaurant and bar. Roseland has been named "Best Haunted Venue" by one local publication, referring to the 1990 murder. The venue is known for hosting a variety of music acts and for its good acoustics.
History
Apostolic Faith Church
The Apostolic Faith Church bought the property at 8 Northwest Sixth Avenue from the A. Meier estate in 1922 and immediately began constructing a two-story building at the site. To make way for the new structure, church members first razed an older building that had housed a saloon at that address. The new building was finished in August 1922.
Made of brick and constructed entirely with donated labor, the structure had a footprint of next to a parking lot. The lower floor contained 11 storerooms, some of which were rented to others, a printing room, the church headquarters, and a small chapel with a seating capacity of 200. The upper floor consisted of a large meeting hall that could seat 1,150 people. The meeting hall was designed partly with music in mind. Its raised platform held up to 70 people, including a 40-piece orchestra and male and mixed quartets that performed during church services. The church sold the building in 1981. A neon sign reading "Jesus, the Light of the World", hung on the building but was removed in 1981.
Starry Night
Larry Hurwitz owned and operated the Starry Night nightclub in the building from 1982 through 1991. The venue had a capacity of less than 1,000 people. In the 1980s, the Starry Night hosted musical acts including Animotion, Nu Shooz, and the Crazy 8s. Hurwitz sold the Starry Night in February 1991, claiming he had "lost the support of the local music industry". The transfer in ownership resulted in a name change to Roseland Theater. In 1992, Roseland's manager for the new owners, Oregon Theater Management, said the name was changed to disassociate from Hurwitz's business and reputation.
Murder of Starry Night employee
In 2000, Hurwitz was convicted of the murder 10 years earlier of the Starry Night's 21-year-old publicity agent, Timothy Moreau, to keep Moreau from alerting authorities to a counterfeit ticket scam at the club. Another club employee, George Castagnola, pleaded guilty to helping Hurwitz kill Moreau. Moreau was strangled in the theater after a John Lee Hooker concert. After selling the club, Hurwitz moved to Vietnam, but in 1997 a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of tax evasion related to the scam. Extradited to the United States and pleading guilty to the tax evasion charges, he was sentenced to a year in federal prison. Publicity generated by the tax-evasion trial led to new information about the murder. Hurwitz was sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading no contest to one count of murder in 2000, and released in 2008 after serving between 7 and 8 years. Meanwhile, to settle a civil wrongful-death suit filed against him by Moreau's parents, Hurwitz in 2001 stipulated to his part in the murder, agreed that a jury would have found him guilty if he had not pleaded "no contest", and agreed to pay the Moreau family 3 million in damages. The details of the case were reported in a 23-part series in the newspaper PDXS during the 1990s.