One thing I noticed during my weekend trip to San Francisco:
During my Geary St. bus ride out to the ocean, I saw that my former apartment (16th and Geary) is still there, but the Alexandria Theater (18th and Geary), where I worked part-time for about 6 months in 1994-1995 while attending San Francisco State, is in a complete state of disrepair. I did not take the below photos---they're from a new May 8, 2025, article from KQED that I just found online, answering my questions about what the hell had happened to it! https://www.kqed.org/news/12039111/historic-san-francisco-theater-might-finally-redeveloped-housing
EXCERPTS from above link:
The historic Alexandria Theater, located in
San Francisco’s Richmond District, closed in 2004, and as the building
has sat empty, development proposals have come and gone. As officials look for sites to add more homes, city leaders just cleared the way for a new proposal.
On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisors approved the creation of a special district
that would allow the theater to be redeveloped into an eight-story
building with 75 apartments, each with two to three bedrooms inside, and
at least 12% set aside for affordable housing units....
The special district requires the building to
maintain some of its historic features, including its marquee, interior
chandelier and murals. Chan and leaders of some neighborhood groups
pointed to the project as a way to add housing in a thoughtful way that
maintains the character of the neighborhood....
The theater opened in 1923 and was constructed
by the Reid brothers, who also designed the third version of Cliff
House, the Balboa Theater in the Outer Richmond and the Grand Lake
Theater in Oakland. After the Alexandria Theater closed in 2004, it
changed ownership several times as plans for redevelopment stalled....
Woody LaBounty, president of preservationist organization San Francisco Heritage, said while the building’s time as a movie theater has passed, the building itself has unique qualities that make the Richmond an architecturally interesting neighborhood.
“It was created with this unique Egyptian revival style that was very
much of the ‘20s, and because it had all these very attractive design
elements, we’d like to see that preserved and kept for any new project,”
he said. “It adds housing while continuing to provide some sort of
character that speaks to the Richmond District’s history.”....
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Richmond District Blog: 7/8/11
SFGate on closing of theater: 2/20/04
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My own random personal memories while working there (6 months in '94-'95):
* Famous people that attended movies there while I was working:
Robin Williams: Came in with female companion to see "Braveheart"; very low-key, wearing baseball cap, did not attract any notice (except amongst us employees---we all gawked but no one pestered him for an autograph); asked me (working at counter) where the men's room was.
Danny Glover: Came in with entourage of about 4 or 5 other black men to see "Braveheart." Embarrassing to me because I was working the counter, and the popcorn machine had JUST broken a couple of hours earlier---and one of Glover's entourage specifically asked me if the popcorn was hot and fresh! (It was NOT! We were frantically bagging popcorn up from another theater down the road and dumping it---quite cold!---in our machine for sale!) I still remember how this group of guys sat in the theater: Glover was in one row with a guy on either side of him, then the rest of the guys from the group sat in the row directly behind him.
* The way the theater captured mice was disgusting and horrifying: glue boxes (mice would enter the box and get stuck to the glue and then die there of starvation; when I would take a break and sit in on movies playing, you could hear the mice scittering to free themselves from those boxes that were hidden under the theater seats).
* In the attic/storage space, I graffiti'ed something like "Stephanie from Texas was here, '94" on a beam. Wonder if that's still there?
* Without management's knowledge, we employees all snuck in after hours late one weekend night to see a popular film that had not yet been released. The guy who ran the projector finagled all of this. And I CANNOT NOW REMEMBER WHAT THE FILM WAS!! : ( (I'd at first remembered it as being a "Star Wars" film, but there was nothing released in that series either in '94 or '95---and I now have no idea what big thing it was I might have seen ahead of time!)
* A young female co-worker got robbed at gunpoint at the front box-office ticket window.
* Asian teens and black teens would often try to sneak in the side door without paying. Once when we caught a group of Asian teens, they yelled, "You're racist!" The manager who had caught them and kicked them out was from Myanmar/Burma. When I personally caught a group of black teens trying to sneak in, their female leader yelled at me: "You don't know nothin' you frizzy-haired bitch!" (Ouch! That was always a sore point with me: How terrible my hair constantly looked while I lived in San Francisco---that ocean air!)
*Whenever I worked at the popcorn counter, I would often eat so much free popcorn that it made me sick. But I couldn't stop! One thing I always hated doing was asking each customer: "Would you like a large for a quarter more?"
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