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Hundreds of theaters demolished, face closure or conversion

SANTA CRUZ — Old movie palaces are going the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth. The National Trust For Historic Preservation recently named these theaters on its list of "11 most endangered historic places."

The decline makes Saturday’s grand reopening of the Del Mar Theatre on Pacific Avenue a truly grand event, preservationists say.

The Del Mar once had a giant-screen theater with hundreds of seats. The huge room was later divided into two theaters.

In a bold move, new owners Jim Schwenterley and Chuck Volwiler — who also own the Nickelodeon theater — restored the big screen to its full glory, with just under 500 seats. Two upstairs theaters have 150 seats each.

The big screen theater’s restoration makes the room look symmetrical again, with a gilded maiden sculpture on either side of the screen. Outside, the Del Mar marquee shines brightly again, lighting up the block at night.

The Del Mar opened its doors to customers Feb. 8. The owners avoided a big to-do at the time so they could work out any operational bugs before the grand opening.

Customers already love the place. Two movie-goers drove all the way up from Monterey recently just to check it out. Karen Sotelo of Santa Cruz liked the plush seats and the preservation of the Del Mar’s original design.The $2 million restoration, and the fact the theater will be showing first-run films, bucks a national trend, said Jim Peterson of the Washington, D.C.-based National Trust For Historic Preservation.

According to Richard Moe, trust president, hundreds of old movie houses faced the wrecking ball in recent years and more close every year.

Schwenterley has witnessed the loss of some grand old theaters.

He grew up in Cincinnati and remembers seeing films in "huge, huge palaces. They were giant, beautiful, ornate. Now you go up there and there’s no trace, no sign anything was ever there."

Three years ago, United Artists shut down the Del Mar, which couldn’t compete with multiplexes. Santa Cruz Cinema 9 opened down the street in 1995. By then, the Del Mar already had faded.

In its grand old days, the Del Mar could host premieres of movies. Near the end, it was limping along with such non-hit fare as "That Thing You Do," and movies that faded out of first-run movie houses.

An unusual public-private partnership made saving the Del Mar possible. The city bought the 65-year-old theater last year for $1.2 million and entered into an agreement with developers George Ow, Jr. and Barry Swenson.

The developers are sub-leasing the theater to Jim Schwenterley and Chuck Volwiler, owners of the Nickelodeon art movie theater, who invested $600,000 in the new venture.

But many other Bay Area theaters had no such luck.

Since 1980, 35 single-screen theaters have closed in San Francisco alone, according to the trust. Those that remain are "widely considered white elephants."

In the rest of America, the most famous old movie palaces are barely holding on.

Thousands of movie lovers escaped from the Great Depression inside the 1937-era Capitol Theater in Burlington, Iowa, but that magic had faded by 1977. The screen has been dark since then and inspectors have declared the building unstable. The 900-seat Senator Theater in Baltimore, Md., is reportedly hanging on by a thread.

Closer to home, preservationists fought hard to keep open Palo Alto’s Varsity Theater, which closed in 1994. The exterior was saved but the interior was gutted and turned into a Borders bookstore.

Fortunately for old movie house lovers, some other old theaters are also survivors, including the Fox in Watsonville, and the resurrected Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz. These days the Rio is mostly a performing arts center, hosting everyone from Arlo Guthrie to bizarre performance art/music group The Residents, but it does show occasional films.

Historic theaters have little in common with the concrete boxes most consider theaters these days.

The true old-timers had cavernous spaces, gilded decorations on the walls and comfort rooms for wailing babies. Chinese, Egyptian and Art Deco touches added to the atmosphere.

The losses changed the landscape in Santa Cruz. Preservationists could not save the 1920-vintage New Santa Cruz Theatre on Pacific Avenue and Walnut Street.

Local historian Ross Gibson called New Santa Cruz "a movie palace, our first civic auditorium, and it had a small vaudeville stage."

Developers converted the building into other businesses in the 1970s.

According to the preservation trust, many rightfully blame the multiplex trend for the death of many old theaters, while forgetting the huge size of the one-screen palaces also sealed their doom.

Many had high operating costs and often hundreds, even thousands of seats per screen, making it hard to sell out and stay in the black — especially when multiplexes often made it tough for single screens to get anything but second- run fare.

Gibson said the Del Mar, too, might have become office space if residents hadn’t banded together to keep it open.

The people who are saving the Del Mar have an unusual approach to the problem.

For one, several parties are sharing the financial risk so no one party would take the big hit if the theater doesn’t prosper.

Schwenterley and Volwiler knew it would be absurd to open up a revived theater that specialized in the same films that multiplexes are showing.

Instead they are making the Del Mar a sister theater to "The Nick," showing edgy independents.

But they are confident enough in their future to make the Del Mar a straight-up movie center, not a part-restaurant, part-performing arts center.

Once again they are defying a national trend. Some owners of old movie houses are so skittish about their future, they are turning the palaces into hybrids: the Jan. 21 issue of U.S. News and World Report mentioned the popularity of "cinegrills," offering burgers to beef up profits.

Contact Dan White at dwhite@santa-cruz.com.

Downtown celebrates theater

The local band Water provided Dixieland jazz as street-goers stopped and formed a crowd around the theater, which opened Feb. 8.

Police closed Pacific Avenue from Cathcart to Lincoln streets for event. The Santa Cruz High School marching band and a procession of classic American cars paraded down the street at 5:30 p.m.

The event, which included a movie celebrity look-alike contest, marks the grand reopening of the theater, built in 1936. The first movie ever played at the Del Mar, "China Clipper," was re-screened at 8 p.m.

Tickets for the show, which was screened on the theater’s 500-seat screen, sold out days before the event.

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