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Lost Treasures: California Theater
| Wednesday, Nov 8 2006 12:16 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Nov 14 2006 2:05 PM
California Theater
Photos:
California Theatre 1925, Chester near 18th Street.
California Theater
California Theater on left, now America West Bank. Photo taken mid-1930's
One of the first buildings to rise from the ashes of the great fire in 1889, the California Theater was considered the “first metropolitan building” in Bakersfield.
The “old Scribner opera house” on Chester Avenue had a decorative rococo exterior and housed several businesses, including a deluxe saloon. It had a balcony, ushers, and the first marble staircase in Bakersfield.
In 1920 the building, at the corner of Chester Avenue and Wall Street, was converted into a “modern motion picture palace,” complete with a pit orchestra to accompany silent movies and vaudeville acts.
Leo J. Pierucci attended “shorts” and “cliff hangers” on Saturday afternoons at the California in the 1920s and 30s.
“Every week there would be a ‘short,’ as we called them, and each one in the series would be a ‘cliff hanger’ that would keep us in suspense until the next week,” recalled Pierucci, who is approaching his 70th year of continuous employment as a banker in Bakersfield.
“No one wanted to miss a single episode as we had bets on what would happen the next week,” he said.
When Pierucci was in high school and going on dates, a run to Michener’s Drive In for hamburgers and cokes cost 75 cents and movie admission was 25 cents, so the price of the date came to a total of $1, he recalled.
Architect Dave Cross worked on the extensive renovation in 1966 that converted the theater into a bank. He remembers poking his head into the downstage and the dressing rooms under the stairs, which were filled in to support the remodeled building.
Community National Bank moved in after the remodel in the late 1960s. Today the old theater stands vacant and for lease.