Before multiplexes, cinemas stood out
Theaters from golden age dazzled audiences in S.F., and a few still live on
The Chronicle article covering the 1929 opening of the Fox Theater was memorably effusive, reading as if the reporter sent the dispatch by telegraph from a war zone, or wrote the story in midair after jumping out of an airplane.
Maybe the unnamed author was so blinded by the Market Street movie palace’s spectacle, all he could do was transcribe the random words jotted down in his reporter’s notebook.
“A dazzle of color — the overpowering brilliance of a million lights — beauty, beauty, everywhere,” the Page One story began. “More lights — music — more beauty, girls so beautiful it brought a catch in one’s throat to look at them — more lights — fireworks — more beauty.”
San Francisco’s movie houses have always been a little bit bigger than life. The city was once filled with cinemas — descendants of the live theater scene that developed in the Gold Rush era. In the early 1950s, there were more than a dozen theaters on Market Street alone, lighting up the boulevard in vertical neon.
Most of those theaters are gone now, often after a slow and painful death. The last Market Street cinema to show Hollywood movies, the St. Francis Theatre, was chopped up into multiple screens in the 1960s, closed in 2001 and stood in boarded-up shame for more than a decade before it was demolished.
But there’s a Hollywood ending, if you’re willing to turn down the house lights and succumb to the movie magic.
While the surviving movie theaters themselves are scattered and few, activists who fought for them held the line short of extinction.
Several cinemas claim the title, but it’s hard to pinpoint the first movie theater in San Francisco history. Starting in the late 1800s, several live theaters, most of them downtown, started showing kinetoscope and other “moving pictures” to complement their vaudeville programs, dancing girls and freak shows.
After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco’s rebirth and reinvention coincided with the rise of feature films.
The Warfield, St. Francis, Orpheum, Golden Gate, Esquire, Paramount, United Nations, United Artists, State and Market Street Cinema were some of the bigger Market Street theaters, with smaller houses including the Telenews and Crest squeezing in. Most opened in the 1910s and 1920s — still in the silent film era.
The biggest films opened to exclusive Market Street engagements, while most neighborhood theaters, including the Granada, New Mission, Haight and Alexandria, took the scraps weeks or months later. But there was architectural majesty across the city. While noted theater designer Thomas W. Lamb built the Fox, Timothy Pflueger brought his focused and eclectic style in the 1920s and early 1930s to the Alhambra Theatre on Polk Street, the El Rey on Ocean Boulevard and the Castro Theatre on Castro Street.
The first “talkie” played on Market Street, opening on Feb. 9, 1928.
“Al Jolson comes to the Embassy Theater today in ‘The Jazz Singer,’ Vitaphone’s first full-length feature,” The Chronicle announced. “That means Jolson’s voice is heard accompanying the action. He sings the lilting ‘Blue Skies,’ a ‘Mammy’ song or two, ‘Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,’ and, for contrast, the Jewish ‘Kol Nidrei.’ ”
The Fox Theatre was under construction at the time, a palatial anchor on the western end of the theater row. It was built with 4,651 seats, and the opening was a seminal San Francisco event of the 1920s.
“Throngs, in Enthusiastic Stampede, Break All Barriers as Notables of Movie Land Arrive for Celebration,” The Chronicle’s headline read.
Newspaper headlines were prone to hyperbole at the time, but there was little exaggeration with this one. When more than 75,000 people showed up to the event, mounted police were called in to clear the path for ticketed customers to the theater’s doors. The Chronicle reported that five women or girls fainted at the sight of someone famous. Two more were arrested trying to sneak in a window with a screwdriver.
“Of such Kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria was woven the festival that marked the presentation to San Francisco last night of the beautiful new $5 million Fox Theater,” The Chronicle’s Page One coverage proclaimed. “It was a spectacle of such beauty and magnitude that it seemed rather a fancy of one’s mind than the inaugural night of another commercial enterprise.”
Visually, the movie house lived up to
the hype. But it was constricted from the beginning by restrictive distribution rules that forced most Market Street theaters to show movies made by a single studio. Fox had the best vibe, but not the best films. “Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Casablanca” all played down the street at inferior theaters.
Television’s Bay Area arrival in the late 1940s was another blow to the city’s movie theaters. As the most recent boom of neighborhood theaters was completed — the Coronet opened in 1949 — singlescreen theaters were already starting to struggle.
By the early 1960s, the Fox’s opulence was deeply faded, with owners who were eager to stop losing money and cash in on the land value. Everyone from Mayor George Christopher to Herb Caen and The Chronicle’s editorial board backed the demolition, often in a mocking or patronizing tone.
“That was an earlier entertainment age, when opulence and extravagance were the rule,” Christopher told The Chronicle. “San Francisco’s Fox Theatre belongs in that age. It’s an extravagant waste of land.”
The Fox defenders were poorly organized — Caen noted that the “Save the Fox Theater” headquarters was demolished months before the theater met the same fate. (“A committee to save the ‘Save the Fox Theater’ headquarters could not be organized in time,” Caen quipped.) After a last-ditch attempt to save the theater was turned down by voters, plans for a demolition and skyscraper were announced in 1961.
“The great white elephant of Market Street … will disappear next year to make way for an ultra-modern 32-story office building,” The Chronicle’s story began.
In the same article, an artist’s rendition for a futuristic cloverleaf-shaped building with a lush park was promised. Instead, after the 1962 demolition, the citizens got an ugly brown box in Fox Plaza. By eye test, it was the worst trade-off in Bay Area history — at least until the Warriors gave up Robert Parish for Joe Barry Carroll.
The next two decades brought more of the same. Summer blockbusters and multiplexes arrived in the mid-1970s — when convenience took precedence over beauty for moviegoers. The lucky theaters were demolished quickly. The unlucky ones were chopped up into makeshift multiplexes first, turned into porn theaters and dragged their neighborhoods down with them.
This April 2, 1974, Chronicle article, typical for the time, gave moviegoers two pieces of bad news in one story.
“The Alhambra Theater on Polk Street is about to be divided in two,” The Chronicle reported. “The Castro Theatre on Castro Street might soon be sold — and maybe even purchased by a developer who would demolish it.”
Conservative Supervisor John Barbagelata later called the Castro a “pigpen,” while the lawyer representing the building’s owners hurled fiercer insults.
“Those people want to call it an example of art nouveau,” attorney Samuel Holmes said. “Me? I call it a parody of the baroque.”
But the Castro Theatre, grimy yet still with its architectural features intact, seemed to be the line in the sand. A new group of activists emerged, including longtime San Francisco theater preservaNeighborhood tionist Steve Levin. They were buoyed by a more progressive city leadership, as the last of the Republicans were voted out of office. The Castro received landmark status in 1977 and, after reinvention, is a San Francisco treasure.
“The great theaters are from an era when the movies were a fantasy world, and theaters were fantasy palaces on every corner,” Levin told The Chronicle in 1974. “It’s an endangered species, but many of them can be saved if new uses for them are found.”
His words proved prophetic. Theaters that would have been hit with a wrecking ball a decade and a half earlier — including the El Rey and Alhambra — found new life as gyms and churches, but the buildings were saved.
Meanwhile, the sputtering Market Street theater scene received a second life from unlikely sources — the live music and live theater communities.
On June 2, 1979, the Warfield scheduled Jefferson Starship — the theater’s first music act after decades as a movie theater. Bill Graham brought Bob Dylan to the Warfield four months later, for a successful 14-show run.
“I give Dylan all the credit in the world,” Graham told The Chronicle’s Joel Selvin. “He could have sold out the Cow Palace or the Oakland Coliseum a couple times, and he chose to do this instead. It was his decision. My monkey wrench isn’t that big.”
Around the same time in the 1970s, Carole Shorenstein Hays and Robert Nederlander were looking at other surviving theaters for their new theater production company — in 2015, SHN operates out of the Curran, Orpheum and Golden Gate theaters.
Newer voices on behalf of theaters have emerged, including Landmark Theatres co-founder Gary Meyer and local theater historian Jack Tillmany. And while surviving theaters are by no means safe, the losses no longer outnumber the victories.
Movie lovers lost the Coronet to the wrecking ball, and the Alexandria, Red Vic and Bridge have closed as well. But the preservationist spirit of the San Francisco Theater Foundation helped to bring back the Vogue and preserve the Balboa. The San Francisco Film Society has supported the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, while artist and activist Christopher Statton worked tirelessly to save the Roxie Theater, now operating as a nonprofit.
The Strand Theater on Market, boarded up since 2003, reopened this year as an American Conservatory Theater space after a radical modern remodel.
Then there is the New Mission, a 2,000seat theater from the 1910s designed by the Reid Brothers, the architecture and engineering firm that also designed San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel and the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland.
The theater closed in the early 1990s after struggling since the 1960s. It seemed finished later that decade, when City College of San Francisco unveiled plans to make the space the centerpiece of a 9,000-student campus. But a hodgepodge of neighborhood activists, theaterlovers and progressive politicians fought back — managing to fend off the project even after the theater was denied landmark status. The shadow of the Fox Theatre, lost and replaced with an eyesore, loomed over the debate.
“We have no opposition at all to a campus being here in the Mission,” preservationist Will Shank told The Chronicle in 2001. “Our concern is that yet again, San Francisco will have egg on its face for losing an important part of history.”
The New Mission is being renovated now, and it will be reopened this year by the owners of the Alamo Drafthouse as a five-screen theater with beer and high-end food.
Another reinvention, and another piece of history saved. Another San Francisco movie palace lives on, passed on to the next generation.