



Responding to an invitation by the legendary Bill Strickland of the Manchester Craftmen’s Guild to a weeklong seminar at the Harvard Business School, I wrote a business plan comparing the purchase and renovation of two shuttered movie theaters - the York Theater on 24th or the much larger Mission Theater on Mission St.

Architect and friend Gail Sullivan conducted a design charette back in SF with board and staff to envision our future.
We settled on the York Theater, originally the Roosevelt Theater, built by the Reid Brothers in 1926.
The renowned architects also built the Hotel Del Coronado, the Cliff House, the Fairmont Hotel and the Pacific Stock Exchange. We were determined to purchase the beloved yet abandoned building. Board members Sonia Basheva Manjon, Heidi Sieck, David Serrano Sewell and Maria X. Martinez played key roles. Located on almost an entire city block on the iconic 24th Street Corridor, we paid the ridiculously low price of $650,000; it seemed the negotiation tactics I learned at the Harvard Business School worked!
To celebrate our closing, Mayor
Willie L. Brown led a lowrider parade






We learned that the theater was a Spanish language film house in the forties, finding old movie posters behind the walls. Later, it was home to the annual Encuentro del Canto Popular. We were thrilled to discover that the legendary magician Houdini opened the theater in 1926! A prized find was an old suitcase with vintage stickers from all over the world.
All through the two-year construction project, we felt the spirits of the thousands of performers that passed through the Roosevelt and the York over the many decades.




We discovered a mural celebrating the 1919 World’s Fair buried under old renovations. We restored the theater’s painted ceiling as well as classical and deco elements. We utilized the once active organ lofts to house giant bass speakers.


and performed libations with BRAVA staff and noted Bay Area artists Ellen Sebastian, Brian Freeman, Wilma Bonet and June Lomena. We engaged modernist architect Mark Cavagnero to reconfigure the 1200 seat vaudeville house to 400 and 100 seat theaters with modern lighting (Jack Carpenter) and sound systems (Meyer Laboratories) and a bold design (AIA Design Award winner) utilizing both new and old elements of the historic theater. Fernando Duarte created a neon marquee sign that won international design awards.

After ten years of producing theater in various spaces, I went in search of the perfect future home for BRAVA in the mid-nineties.
We needed, wanted, hoped for our own space that could solidify a decade of our roots in the Mission District.
BUILDING A DREAM

