North Park

This guide to North Park in San Diego follows the marquee theater on University Avenue from its true 1929 opening as the city's first sound-equipped picture palace, through sixty years as a Fox West Coast Theatres fixture, to the dark projector booth of 1989. It traces the empty decade that followed, the city's costly seismic retrofit, and a developer's restoration of the chandeliers and organ grilles for a 2005 reopening as a stage for opera and plays. Along the way it corrects a claim on the old marquee that never quite held up. Listen for how a single stage kept finding new audiences willing to stand for something different.