The Empress: One Hundred Fourteen Years of Vallejo on Stage
Near Vallejo, California
The building at the corner of Virginia Street opened on Valentine's Day, nineteen twelve, with a vaudeville act. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows had commissioned architect William A. Jones to design it, and Jones gave them a Beaux-Arts facade with an interior that held nine hundred forty seats.
The Sullivan and Considine circuit supplied the acts. In those years, the Empress was one stop on a vaudeville chain that ran up and down the Pacific Coast, booking jugglers, comedians, singers, and the novelty performers that the era required. By nineteen thirteen it had been renamed the Republic. Later it became the Vallejo Theatre, and after a fire in nineteen thirty the Fox Senator Theatre. Each name carried a different era of entertainment with it.
The Loma Prieta earthquake struck on October seventeenth, nineteen eighty-nine, and the damage was significant enough that the building stood vacant for nearly twenty years. It sat in downtown Vallejo through the lean decades, sealed and decaying, while the city itself cycled through the economic disruptions that followed the closure of Mare Island.
It reopened in two thousand eight, the same year the city filed for bankruptcy. The timing was improbable. The Empress has operated as a performing arts venue and music hall since, still one of the oldest performance spaces in the city.
