This is the second in my Vintage California Theatre blog series.Growing up in Alameda, the neighboring island city to Oakland, I discovered the Grand Lake Theatre when I started to drive in high school. The theater became one of my favorite Bay Area landmarks as a teen and young adult. The place where I first held hands with a date. We would sit in the balcony where I remember seeing the first running of The Godfather, The Exorcist and The Sting.
Years later, I worked at the Golden State Warriors Downtown Oakland practice facility and office. Early mornings before work, I would use the Warriors weight room and do a five mile run from downtown, around Lake Merritt and back. At the top of the lake on Grand Avenue, I knew I was half way into my run, when I would see the Grand Lake Theatre roof sign over the top of the freeway overpass a block or so away.
Paramount Theatre, Fox Oakland before and after renovation
I was spoiled by my hometown movie house, the Alameda Theatre. Oakland has other architectural masterpieces that served as movie theaters including the Paramount Theatre and the Fox Oakland. I saw very few movies at the Paramount and attended a few live performances. The Fox Oakland was closed for all of the years I lived in the Bay Area. It was closed for 30 years in extreme disrepair. I would drive by on my way to The College of the Arts in the 70’s and admire the architecture, wondered what it looked like in the 30’s through the 50’s. It is now open as a live music venue, arts school, and restaurant. It looks stunning.
Grand Lake Theatre - Designated as one of the top ten vintage theaters in the United States
3200 Grand Avenue, Oakland, California
The historic Grand Lake Theater is located on the corner of Grand Avenue and Lake Park Avenue in the Grand/Lakeshore District of Oakland. It opened as a as a vaudeville and silent movie house on Saturday, March 6, 1926. Two years later, the theatre was added to the Fox Theater chain and vaudeville performances were dropped with the introduction of talking pictures. With an Art Deco design and Egyptian Revival and Moorish touches the Grand Lake Theater celebrates a time when going to a movie was a larger than life shared experience. Complete with an ornate foyer with a crystal chandelier, a Wurlitzer Organ that stands in the main auditorium and is still played before Friday and Saturday movies, a dramatic stage and working curtain, and luxuriously appointed walls and ceiling, the 1920s unique theatre style has been preserved.
Above the theatre sits a 52-foot high by 72-feet long rotary contact sign (the largest west of the Mississippi River), illuminated by 2,800 colored incandescent bulbs and looks like a series of fireworks explosions.
Allen Michaan, owner of the Grand Lake is dedicated to keeping the theatre open and and preserving the classic movie palace experience in an era of declining local theaters and changing cultural choices with digital entertainment options. He comments in a SFGate article, "What I've tried to do here at the Grand Lake is preserve the classic golden age of Hollywood moviegoing experience, and it doesn't exist anywhere else. We don't play commercials. We serve real butter on the popcorn. We don't fill our lobbies with video games. We have the Wurlitzer pipe organ playing in the main auditorium on Friday and Saturday nights before the feature. I don't think there's a first-run theater across the country that is doing that right now."
Grand Lake Theatre Facts:
Winner of the East Bay Express Reader Poll as the Best Movie Theater almost every year.
Former Grand Lake patrons include Tom Hanks and Frank Oz.
Next Up: Orinda Theatre, Orinda, CA