Fox-Oakland Theater

About this property

The Fox Oakland Theatre is a 2,800-seat concert hall, a former movie theater, located at 1807 Telegraph Avenue in Downtown Oakland. It originally opened in 1928, running films until 1970. Designed by Weeks and Day, the theatre is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was refurbished in the 2000s and reopened as a concert venue on February 5, 2009. Originally intended to be named "The Bagdad" because of its Middle Eastern influenced architecture, the theater instead displayed the name "The Oakland" on the marquee, with the word "Oakland" forming the main portion of the vertical blade sign above the marquee. It was also known as the "West Coast Oakland". The Oakland became the 251st theater to open in the West Coast Theater chain. Opening day was October 27, 1928, after two years of construction. The opening celebration was highly anticipated by the Bay Area residents, as the theater's 3,200 seats made it the largest in Oakland, more than the nearby Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco which held 2,561, and more than the new 1,075-seat Dufwin which had opened three weeks earlier. The first film shown at the Oakland was Fox's The Air Circus, an early sound film. Live performances took place on stage between films and newsreels, including "King of the Banjo" Eddie Peabody. House Music was provided by the Hermie King band with 20 members, and by an organist playing the house organ, a Wurlitzer Opus 1960 with 3 manuals and 15 ranks of pipes. A staff of 150 was required to run the theater. In March 1929, the theater was renamed the "Fox Oakland" when William Fox bought the West Coast Theatres chain and merged it with his Fox Theatres chain. The launch of the Fox was expected to earn high earnings in the downtown district. Reestablishing the movie industry, the Fox offered the opportunity to stray from the silent films and helped introduce the "talkies" by having a live stage show. Attendance significantly dropped in the 1960s and on September 14, 1965 the Fox closed, "temporarily," according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "The movie ... which will be shown on the Fox Oakland's last day is the Marlon Brando spy melodrama, Morituri". During the next seven years the theater opened sporadically for movies and special events, but never found a market that could support the required overhead and maintenance. In 1973 the theater building was twice the victim of arson after the owner refused to hire a quota of Black Panthers and pay for their "protection". In 1977 the theater was used during the filming of the horror film Nightmare in Blood directed by John Stanley. In 1983 and 1984 the Dickens Fair used the theater for Victorian England reenactments, setting up a mock village.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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