The Lost Church is lost no longer
Small venue has new location for 12th anniversary
The Lost Church has found a new home in North Beach, and all it took for the nonprofit performance space to reach its adolescence was a minor miracle.
Launched in the Mission District living room of Brett and Elizabeth Cline in 2011 when they decided to stop touring with their grooverock duo Juanita and the Rabbit, the Lost Church became an indispensable outlet for a wide array of local artists while flying largely under the radar of city regulators at the San Francisco Entertainment Commission.
But long before the advent of COVID-19 and the governor’s March 2020 shelter-inplace order, the Clines knew they had to find a new space for hosting shows that was Americans with Disabilities Act compliant. Emergency funding for businesses and venues shuttered by the pandemic provided a lifeline for the scrappy nonprofit DIY theater, yet after nine months of fruitless searching, they’d burned through most of a Hardly Strictly Bluegrass grant intended to help them find a new home.
“I wanted to stay in the Mission close to BART, but there was no place small enough,” Brett Cline told The Chronicle. Opening a 99-seat theater, he said, entails much of the same cost and bureaucratic hoop-jumping required to create a larger venue, but with a significantly smaller potential revenue stream.
“The math is daunting,” he added. “I started looking in the Financial District and came close, but landlords only wanted to give a fiveyear lease. I’m like, ‘Aren’t you people desperate for a tenant?’ ”
Last spring, just weeks before his Hardly Strictly funding ran out, Cline found a basement space in North Beach at 988 Columbus Ave. and secured a 15-year lease. The Lost Church quietly started presenting shows in August, but the venue only got the final sign-off from the city on Feb. 2. That OK came just in time for it to mark its 12th anniversary on Saturday, Feb. 11, with a boogie blues dance party.
After navigating the Kafkaesque approval process, Cline says he is worn down but relieved rather than bitter. He mostly praises the phalanx of inspectors he’s interacted with over the past six months.
“The Entertainment Commission was great to work with,” he said. “They were holding our hands to get through all these hurdles. They were super stoked for us and wanted us to succeed. But it’s an incredibly complex process to open a theater in San Francisco. Oftentimes, one department’s set of rules conflicts with another.”
Saturday’s celebration is scheduled to feature the blues boogie band Edge City Fever, consisting of Brett Cline on vocals and wife Elizabeth on drums, with 4
Non Blondes guitarist Roger Rocha and El Destroyo bassist Ari Gorman. While the Clines turned their living room into the Lost Church as a vehicle for his elaborate musical theater productions, Edge City Fever reflects his evolution into a devotee of seminal blues stompers like Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo and John Lee Hooker.
“I fell in love with these old boogie tunes,” he said. “And I love to make people dance. We’re figuring out what chairs to move. Most of our shows are seated. This one will have some dancing.”
Along with the recently opened Keys Jazz Bistro and the jazz-oriented supper club Lyon & Swan, the Lost Church adds to North Beach’s rebound as one of the city’s most inviting entertainment hubs. With a capacity of about 100, the venue is continuing the wide-open booking policy that made the Clines’ Capp Street venue such an invaluable space for experimentation. It hosts a stylistically diverse array of music, theater, film and comedy, mentalist and magician Brad Barton, and all manner of hybrid-performance high jinks.
San Francisco singersongwriter Rachel Garlin has been a regular at the Lost Church for years, celebrating the release of albums and presenting projects in process, like “The Ballad of Madelyne & Therese,” a musical theater piece that she’ll be workshopping at the venue March 11. It’s the kind of welcoming environment that has earned her a loyal following among local artists.
“I started performing there and ended up becoming a collaborator, in terms of thinking about how they could survive the pandemic,” Garlin said. “I love introducing people to the venue.”
Co-creativity and audience involvement are part of the Lost Church gospel, which is starting to spread. Working with North Bay Hootenanny founder Josh Windmiller, who’s now the Lost Church’s director of development, the Clines spent years looking for a second space before opening a Santa Rosa venue in January 2020. While being mindful of not expanding beyond its capacity, the Lost Church is open to opportunities beyond the Bay Area.
“We want to open other Lost Churches in other cities,” said Operations Director Michele Kappel. “With the North Beach stage, we can work with an artist and put them in both theaters. One day people could play Lost Churches up and down the coast. There are a lot of 400-600 capacity spaces, but the small rooms are precious, where artists can really experiment.”