The Castro turns 85

By Max Goldberg

“It is the desire and ultimate aim of the management to create an atmosphere of refinement and comfort within the walls of this Theatre. This service contemplates comfort, courtesy, and contentment — delight in the best of pictures, and the interpretation of music to the highest degree.” Not that the Castro’s diva status has ever been in question, but this grandiloquent bit from the handbill announcing the theatre’s opening seems all too fitting: this particular theatre has always known it’s a peach. That first program — consisting of no less than eight segments, “Entire Orchestra and Balcony, 25c plus tax” — happened eighty-five years ago: June 22, 1922, to be precise. Audiences that night enjoyed a newsreel, novelty acts, an orchestral performance, Wallace Reid in “Across the Continent,” and — it wouldn’t be the Castro without it — an “organ offering.”

The Castro is celebrating its impressive anniversary with a similar sundry of live music, shorts, and swashbuckling features this weekend, August 10-12.

Movie-palaces were once commonplace in American cities, but a familiar pattern of neglect and re-development means that most are either gone altogether or ghosts of their former selves (one need only walk a few blocks of the stretch of Market Street around Civic Center to experience the loss firsthand). Odds be damned, the Castro perseveres, still every bit the queen.

The opening program card describes the theatre as the “New Castro Theatre,” and indeed the prolific Nasser family had previously operated two smaller cinemas down the block — one at 450 Castro opened in 1908 and another at 479 Castro (currently Cliff’s Variety Store) in 1910. The Nassers owned a fleet of long-forgotten movie-houses all around the city, but the “new” Castro was the crown jewel with construction tabs running up to $300,000. The brothers hired Timothy Pflueger to design their palace, an architecture prodigy born and raised in the Mission. He was all of 28 when he was set upon the Castro, and one senses his youthful exuberance in the theatre’s daring, gauche mix of styles: equal parts Italian Renaissance and Big Top Circus, Spanish Colonial fa

topics: castro theatre

08.09.2007