The darkened screen (maybe) rises

I've written before about the New Mission theater, the deteriorating marquee of which is one of the most recognizable landmarks in my neighborhood, San Francisco's Mission district. On the left is a picture of that marquee in more vibrant times, advertising the opening of A Hard Day's Night. Below is the theater as I saw it last night, when it was opened to the public for the first time in over twenty years.

No, I wasn't sideways. Uploading photos is hard!

The occasion was a community meeting at which were discussed plans by Austin's Alamo Drafthouse to restore and convert the New Mission, which was built in 1916 as a single screen theater seating over two thousand, into a five screen theater with bar and restaurant facilities with a six hundred seat capacity. Presentations were made by Alamo's CEO Tim League, owner representative Victor Marquez, and a neighborhood activist who mentioned seeing "a lot of Bruce Lee movies" at the New Mission during his youth (and whose name, I'm very sorry to say, now eludes me, as I was too consumed with geeking out over the news to take notes).

The New Mission's designation as an historical landmark substantially limits the degree to which it can be altered by its owner, and so the restoration project is one that will focus on preserving and restoring as much of its interior details as possible, including the cleaning of some of its graffiti covered murals. As you can see from its current condition, that's going to be quite a task. Still, it was put forth that, depending on the speed of approval by the city's Planning Commission, work could be completed as early as late 2013. This would be great for the Mission, which used to be a destination point for the city's movie goers but hasn't had a functioning theater on its main drag for decades. It would also be great for me, because, hey, who doesn't want to be able to have a cold beer while watching a cool movie in a beautiful old movie house?

My apologies to those many of you who live outside the San Francisco Bay Area, for whom this post might seem a little too local. I just wanted to get the word out for those who were interested. Maybe, if this all comes to pass, we can have a beer and a movie next time you're in town.

(Archival photos: sfpl)

Yet more ruins

Believe it or not, I still haven't completed my cataloguing of all the husks of old movie theaters that dot Mission Street, my neighborhood's main drag. I should also mention that all of these theaters, including the one that I'm going to be presenting to you today, can be found within one short, four-block long stretch. Obviously the Mission was quite an entertainment Mecca back in the early days of the mid-twentieth century. This is perhaps reflected in the monumental elements incorporated into a lot of these theaters' designs, which hint at aspirations to permanence that could only have been maintained in an age when television and home video's impact on America's healthy theater-going habits was far beyond the reach of the imagination. Anyway, today, The El Capitan:

The good news for the El Capitan is that its facade remains relatively well-maintained. Though the theater itself closed down in 1964, the hotel attached to it has remained in business to this day, which accounts for it being the beneficiary of a few fresh coats of paint in the ensuing years. Built in 1928, The El Capitan was the largest of Mission Street's movie houses, with seating for over 2500.

The bad new for the El Capitan is that, once you pass under its facade, you see this:

A parking lot. (Not that we don't need the parking in the Mission, mind you.)

I have to admit that while, like most San Franciscans, I have been guilty of passing these ruins by without a second thought on many occasions, I feel a pang of sadness when contemplating them now. This is not to say that I feel that their demise should or could have somehow been avoided. No neighborhood, much less the Mission, could sustain such a large number of screens in this day and age. We should, in fact, probably just be grateful that we have their shells on hand as an impetus to memory and historical inquiry.

It's just that, in a retro-fitted city like San Francisco, where the new is just as likely to be built on-top-of or around the old as it is to supplant it, we're provided numerous opportunities in the course of our daily routines to confront the ghosts of the city's past. Yet we seldom choose to do so, more often than not remaining oblivious to them, or if we do take notice of them, doing so with little in the way of sustained curiosity. Perhaps in deciding to let these structures stand, while at the same time doing little to impede their natural process of decay -- by, in essence, allowing them to turn to dust before our eyes -- the city fathers and mothers have provided us with an inadvertent and far too vivid reminder of the impermanence of all of those cozily familiar edifices that we today regard as imperishable fixtures of our daily lives -- all of them monuments to commerce and diversion that are themselves just ruins in the making.

Anyway, I guess this is just my effort to stop and look the ghost in the eye for a moment -- before, of course, turning back on my way in search of dollar DVDs and cheap tube socks

More local ruins

Last week, in the course of what was supposed to be a post dedicated to the work of shot-on-video horror filmmakers the Polonia brothers, I went off on a bit of a tangent about the not inconsiderable number of derelict old movie houses that line Mission Street, my beloved San Francisco neighborhood's main drag. For those of you interested (or, more accurately, because I was interested), I thought I'd share a couple more views of these faded beauties.

Cine Latino is one of the city's oldest movie theaters, having opened back in 1913 under the name The Wigwam. It was rechristened The New Rialto in 1930 and then The Crown in 1947, before finally becoming Cine Latino in 1974. (Thanks to the Cinema Treasures website and its habitues for the historical info.) From what I understand, it was quite a palace in its day, with seating for almost 1500 patrons.

Here's a picture from the archives of the SF Public Library that shows Mission Street during the theater's New Rialto days. You can also see the New Mission theater -- which, as I mentioned in the previous post, is also still standing, if barely -- directly across the street.

And here's a picture from the American Classic Images website that shows the theater in 1986, just a year before it closed its doors for good, and well into its grindhouse phase.

The Tower, originally known as the Majestic, was also built in the teens, and seated about 900. It saw out its last years as a Spanish language theater and was the last of Mission Street's movie theaters to shut its doors, sometime back in the late 90s. Until very recently the structure housed a church. As you can see, it's now for sale. Any takers?