How neighbors quashed 1950 Sutro Drive-In movie theater
Decades before the controversy surrounding the 1970s construction of Sutro Tower in San Francisco, the prospect of a Sutro Drive-In riled up neighborhood leaders from Twin Peaks to Clarendon Heights.
As impossible as it sounds in the housing-starved present, business interests in 1950 wanted to use 8 acres near Sutro Forest to build a 536-car drive-in theater. But even in the Harry S. Truman era, the San Francisco NIMBYs were loud and plentiful.
A series of 1950 Chronicle articles reported a bitter fight, with representatives from 13 neighborhood groups crowding a San Francisco Planning Commission meeting, and painting a picture of drive-ins as filled with lawlessness and depravity.
“Darrell Daly, president of a Forest Hill group, declared that drive-ins ‘attract the rowdy hot-rod element,’ ” The Chronicle reported Feb. 23, 1950. “Representatives of the Twin Peaks Improvement Association and West of Twin Peaks Central Council also opposed the development.”
The battle was one of several curious news items in the Mesozoic Era of the drive-in theater, which swept across the Bay Area in the early ’50s, but managed to all but miss San Francisco.
Drive-ins became popular on the East Coast first, before spreading to Northern Califor-
nia in the 1940s. The Bay Area’s first drive-in was the Concord Motor-In, a 450-car theater built on cow pastures in 1947.
The Chronicle published a lengthy This World article by Gordon Pates, which spent most of its 3,000 words explaining in detail exactly how a drive-in works. Some of the language seems almost impossibly dated, describing a Bay Area cultural and workplace scene that simply doesn’t exist anymore.
“The factory worker or housewife who wants to go to the show but doesn’t want to dress up for it find the drive-in a happy solution to the problem,” Pates wrote. “The MotorIn, for example, has a real appeal for this reason to the farming community around Walnut Creek and Concord.”
But as drive-ins started to multiply in the suburbs — there were at least 37 in the Bay Area by the 1960s — San Francisco was an impenetrable market. The Sutro Drive-In, which would have opened on Clarendon Avenue near Laguna Honda Hospital, was promised by Blumenfeld Theaters Inc. to be “the most beautiful drive-in theater in the United States.”
There was early interest from city leaders, followed by much protest. A coalition including Adolph Sutro’s grandson, Edgar Sutro, ultimately persuaded the Planning Commission to deny a rezoning request that would have allowed a drive-in.
The El Rancho and Spruce drive-ins in South San Francisco, and the Geneva near the Cow Palace, all served San Francisco audiences. The Mission Drive-In used a San Francisco address for business purposes, and was often advertised in the San Francisco movie listings, despite actually being located in Daly City.
But there was one drive-in theater within the San Francisco city limits … briefly.
The Terrace Drive-In opened in 1951 on Alemany Boulevard, adjacent to the farmers’ market, and lasted just three years. As the Sutro neighbors predicted in their fight against the drive-in, foggy nights impacted the economics. Interstate 280 was later built on that land.
Drive-ins continued to hold on through the 1970s, but there were signs that the future wasn’t bright. Several screens in the Bay Area started showing X-rated movies. That includes the Sonomarin on the Sonoma and Marin counties border, which lasted until the late 1980s; the back of the screen was visible on Highway 101.
Rising property values were responsible for many drive-in closures. Bay Area drive-ins in the 1970s to 1980s were replaced by condominium complexes, a Kmart and a BART station.
But a detailed 1983 article about the decline of the drivein, written by The Chronicle’s John Stanley, gave data and testimonials that suggested the multiplex theater was the largest culprit for failing drive-ins. Stanley reported that there were myriad sunken costs for modern drive-in theater operators, often in unexpected places.
“The problem of cars driving off with the speakers still attached to the windows is a perennial drive-in owners headache,” Stanley wrote. “Rarely does the driver want to acknowledge his mistake, and usually throws the speaker away instead of returning it. (Syufy director of operations Ernie Furman) said the annual cost of replacing speakers at some theaters runs as high as $8,700 per year.”
That’s no longer a problem at the surviving Bay Area driveins, of which there are two: The Solano Drive-In in Concord, and the Capitol 6 Drive-In in San Jose. Both have upgraded with better projection, and sound that comes in on an FM channel.
And neither has to worry about there-goes-the-neighborhood protests at City Hall. In an age of Fortnite video games and children on social media, drive-in theaters are considered wholesome entertainment.