In the golden age of California’s movie palaces, these expansive theaters – with their fine art deco interiors, towering facades and flashing marquees – were designed to make guests feel like royalty.
Thousands dressed up to go to the movies during the 1930s, often multiple times a week, lining up around the block to see the latest pictures. The theaters were temples, made to feel eternal – proof that cinema was the height of entertainment, and always would be.
But, of course, it wasn’t. Over 100 years, many of the most historically significant theaters in the Bay Area have undergone dramatic transformations. The San Francisco Fox Theater was closed, then demolished. The Alameda Theater was turned into a restaurant, then a club, before reemerging as a cinema. Other theaters were adapted into multiplexes, trying to meet the demands of the modern entertainment environment.
Now, as the Bay Area grapples with a homeless and housing crisis, some of the remaining historic theaters have emerged as prime candidates for yet another transformation – downtown, transit-oriented housing. Housing advocates say the move is necessary to address the severe shortage.
But cinephiles and preservation advocates argue that without the Bay’s historic theaters, a cultural touchstone in the region will be lost.
“We have seen buildings like this preserved in cities around the country, and they’re all happy they preserved them,” said Allen Michaan, the owner of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. “That’s because they’re an important part of civic life.”
In recent years, this argument has played out across the Bay Area, perhaps no more publicly than the campaign to preserve the United Artists Theater in Berkeley.
The building, also known as the UA, opened in 1932 as an 1,800 seat, single-screen theater. It’s is built in the classic art-deco style, a highly stylized design defined by stark color contrasts and bold lines. Michaan himself remembers going to see The Godfather at the theater in 1972 and feeling in total awe.
But as 1,800-person screenings became increasingly unfeasible, UA split the theater into four or five different auditoriums. Later, the original facade was replaced by a more modern one. Last year, the theater finally closed for good, and the building was purchased by a developer who plans to turn the entire space into housing.
Preservation advocates and the film community quickly rallied against the plan. Although they recognized that the theater had undergone changes, they believed that hidden behind the multiplex walls were the bones of an architecturally unique art-deco masterpiece.
“Everyone sees it as an ugly, rundown, third-rate theater with partitions,” said Rose Arpagian Ellis, the founder of the campaign. “99% of the people who grew up in Berkeley or the Bay Area have no clue what lies behind those partitions.”
In response to the pending demolition of the building, Ellis and others started a Facebook group and began a campaign to pressure the city of Berkeley into landmarking the theater. In their view, the UA is one of just three historically significant cinemas remaining in the East Bay, along with the Paramount and the Alameda.
Patrick Kennedy, the owner of the company planning to develop the building, said the preservation campaign, which he referred to as “the Facebook group”, was misguided and uninformed. He said he believed the group’s landmark effort was nothing more than a “thinly veiled NIMBY action.”
“Right now they’re trying to landmark a cheesy 1992 marquee with a dilapidated plaster front that completely hides the art deco bas relief plasters and is slowly falling apart,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy’s current renovation plan involves restoring the theater’s original facade, preserving existing murals, and incorporating elements of the art-deco design into the building. On Feb. 1, the city of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to landmark the facade, but not the rest of the building.
To Ellis and Michaan’s group, those efforts are not enough. In their view, the whole building needs to stay — revived as a performing arts, cinema, and events space. There are so few theaters in downtown Berkeley, they say, the city cannot afford to lose another one.
“As sacred and as important as new housing is, our cultural heritage is worth saving, too,” Michaan said. “This would be a cultural theft.”
Members of the UA preservation campaign are quick to say they are not anti-housing — they just believe there are other buildings that are not cultural artifacts that can be developed. But housing advocates say that, given the state of the housing crisis, communities have to take “good” over “perfect.”
“Our take is that vacant space is wasted space. We’re in a severe housing shortage, we need to take every opportunity we can to build housing at sites like this,” said Ali Sapirman, an organizer with Housing Action Coalition. “It’s absurd that there’s such strong opposition.”
The controversy is not unique to Berkeley. The historic Burbank Theater in San Jose is pegged to be included in a new housing development, to the disgust of preservation advocates. The Capitola Theater in Santa Cruz County is currently being developed into a hotel, which faced similar opposition. And although Sapirman said those developments were welcome, neither of those theaters fill a need quite in the same way the UA housing project would.
The UA theater is located downtown, in an area that is already densely zoned. It is just minutes from UC Berkeley, less than a block from the closest BART station, and in one of the most walkable parts of the East Bay. The need for housing in Berkeley is particularly high. All told, it is exactly the type of location housing advocates believe should be prioritized for development.
Still, preservation advocates believe there must be a middle path. Although Berkeley’s Landmark Preservation Committee chose not to protect the whole building, the Save the UA group says they have not given up hope and will consider other options.
“If a lot more people are going to be living in Berkeley’s downtown, don’t you want to keep some of these very special buildings?” said Laura Linden, another member of the Save the UA group. “A strong argument could be made that it is the most architecturally valuable in all of Berkeley.”
If the group does indeed succeed in their long-shot bid to save the theater, it would not be the first time a historic cinema was brought back from the brink. The Paramount Theater was restored in partnership with the city of Oakland. The Orinda Theater, too, was restored with the help of public and private partnerships. To those invested in the future of these historic spaces, a myopic focus on housing could leave future generations with a dramatically reduced landscape lacking in imagination, magic, and history.
“Our built environment is drastically impoverished, there is very little to feed the soul,” said Gary Parks, a theater restorationist and preservation advocate. “These buildings are special.”