Balboa Theatre

This guide to the Balboa Theatre on Fourth Avenue follows a Wonder Morton organ pried loose from a shuttered Queens movie palace and trucked nearly three thousand miles west with no guarantee it would ever play again. It traces the theater's own near-collapse, closed in nineteen eighty-five when engineers found its nineteen twenty-four concrete frame too fragile to survive an earthquake, and the delicate structural fix needed to save it without moving its locked-in footprint. Look up toward the grille above the stage, where four keyboards sit behind the pipes.