The Castro Theater opened on Castro Street in 1922, and Pflueger later designed famous movie theaters like Oakland’s Paramount Theater and famous San Francisco cocktail lounges like the Top of the Mark.
“The Castro is sort of a grab bag of Beaux-Arts, Spanish Baroque, Renaissance and a variety of other styles,” said architectural historian Gerard Koskovich, “including some Art Deco elements.”
This mix of styles creates a whimsical setting designed to transport audiences into a world of fantasy and cinema.
The interior of the Castro Theater in 1927. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
In the beginning, the Castro showed silent films, often accompanied by live music from a variety of instruments, most famously Castro’s Wurlitzer organ. The Castro catered primarily to the working-class community in the Eureka Valley, then considered a remote suburb outside of bustling San Francisco.
“Back then, people expected to see a mixed program … some short films, maybe a newsreel, and then a feature film,” Koskovich said.
When the film’s sound arrived, the Castro received speakers installed in a large burlap-lined hole in the wall behind the square cinema screen. When film went wide screen, so did the Castro: another screen was built just a few yards in front of the original screen and proscenium, and over time the old, golden square faded into oblivion. It remains visible in the Castro backstage if you can climb the stairs.
With its 1,400 seats, the Castro was considered small for the time. In San Francisco alone, there was competition from giants like the El Capitan on Mission Street; Now a parking lot, the Cap had twice as many seats as the Castro. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “The World’s Finest Theater,” Fox Theater on Market Street (on the site where Fox Plaza is now located) had 4,651 seats.
The average cinema in 2023 has around 150 seats.
The larger theaters like Fox and El Capitan showed the big blockbusters or premieres, while Castro’s repertoire consisted mostly of second or third screenings—films that had already been played in the larger theaters.
The interior of the Castro Theater in San Francisco on August 10, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
The gay Castro
De-industrialization and white flight changed the composition of the Castro in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the gay community moved in. By all accounts, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon — a lesbian couple who became longtime community activists — were the first openly LGBTQ people to move into the Castro in 1953.
“In the 1950s, this declining working-class neighborhood began to evolve into a gay enclave,” Koskovich said. The Castro’s first gay bar — dubbed the Missouri Mule — opened in 1963. “And in the early ’70s,” Koskovich said, “the Castro was very clearly labeled as a gay neighborhood.”
Mel Novikoff was then a programmer for the Castro Theater and quickly discovered a strategy to bring the neighborhood’s fast-growing gay community to the theatre:
“Bringing back old film, mixing it with art house films and foreign films,” Koskovich said. This is key to understanding this emerging urban public, he added: “These were people who had fled their gritty, monochromatic hometowns and moved to San Francisco because they wanted to pursue a sophisticated, exciting, cosmopolitan cultural life.” Novikoff has understood that.
“And what came out at the Castro Theater,” Koskovich said, “was the fact that there were a lot of crazy movie queens in San Francisco. You just had to watch a double bill of The Women and What Happened to Baby Jane? often dressed like their favorite characters or dressed to mock some of the characters, often reciting the best lines of dialogue.
In the outside world, it wasn’t necessarily safe to be openly gay. But in the Castro Theater, gay people — mostly gay white men — felt safe to express themselves.
In 1977, the Castro Theater was recognized as a beacon for the LGBTQ community when it became San Francisco’s 100th historic landmark, protecting the exterior from demolition or alteration.
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A sanctuary
“Before there were effective treatments around 1996, staying in the community as an AIDS sufferer was impossible,” Koskovich said. In San Francisco alone, nearly 20,000 people died during the AIDS crisis — “the overwhelming majority of them gay men under 50,” Koskovich added, with the majority of them living within two miles of the Castro District. “So imagine the impact of this epidemic, not just on the city but also on this particular neighborhood.”
The Castro Theater became the chapel of a community mourning the loss of a generation of young men.
“It was a place to go after you finished the two memorial services that week for people you knew,” Koskovich recalled. “You could spend a few hours escaping to a movie or a live show. They could bring sick people and they could sit quietly in a safe, secure and comfortable place knowing that if they have any signs they will not be excluded [of AIDS], such as Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. That people would not withdraw from them. They could remain part of the community that had been built there.”
During the ’90s and 2000s, Castro Theater’s involvement and visibility in the LGBTQ community continued to grow under the watchful eye of programmer Anita Monga. She ushered in the era where film festivals like Frameline were held in theaters, as well as major film premieres.
In 2008, the Harvey Milk biopic Milk, much of which is set at the Castro, had its world premiere at the theater. In preparation for the event, the film studio funded a facelift for the Castro’s exterior, giving it a 1970s shine.
Atmosphere at the world premiere of “Milk” at the Castro Theater on October 28, 2008 in San Francisco. (Steve Jennings/WireImage)
The future of an icon
During the COVID-19 pandemic, theaters and concert halls have been closed. Although still owned by descendants of the original Nasser brothers, the Castro Theater came out in 2020 under new management, a company called Another Planet Entertainment. APE is a locally owned concert production company founded in 2003, which also manages the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Fox Theater in Oakland and the Outside Lands Festival.
APE announced plans to refurbish the Castro Theater, including removing the cinema-style fixed seating and adding tiered areas for standing room concerts. The reaction of the film community was quick and determined.
The Castro Theater Conservancy, a community organization whose mission, according to its website, is to protect the theater “as a cultural and entertainment venue for films and live performance,” announced the creation of the Save the Castro Theater campaign in response.
Michael Petrelis holds a sign that reads “Save the Seats” during a town meeting about Another Planet Entertainment renovations at the Castro Theater on August 11, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
What followed were rallies, the online #SaveTheSeats campaign and hundreds of chain emails sent to officials asking that the seats and their layout at a tourist attraction be given special protection.
The Historic Preservation Commission accepted public comments for and against the proposed land marker on February 1, 2023 at San Francisco City Hall. More than 100 people lined up and waited for hours to speak. A majority of public comments opposed proposed changes to the Castro Theater seating.
The HPC voted to recommend the Castro Theater as a landmark, but came close to specifically naming the seats in its recommendation to the San Francisco board of directors. The Castro Theater will have seating, but how many and what type is still up in the air.
Some members of the film community see the changes proposed by APE as destroying a cultural space. On the other hand, there are people who imagine a future in which queer concerts play just as much a role as queer cinema. Either way, the iconic Castro Theater will remain a part of the San Francisco experience for generations to come, whether as a beloved community space or an aging relic of a bygone era.
A final decision on his fate could be made at a board meeting on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at San Francisco City Hall.
