The Fox California Theatre, A Palace on Weber Avenue
Near Stockton, California
Weber Avenue in Stockton has seen several different cities come and go along its length. In nineteen thirty, at the address that is now the Bob Hope Theatre, a movie palace opened that represented the ambitions of one particular version of those cities.
The Fox California Theatre was built at the height of the movie palace era, when theater chains competed to build the most elaborate auditoriums in each market they could reach. The Central Valley in nineteen thirty was prosperous, not yet hit by the Depression, still flush on agricultural money and port trade. The Fox chain built accordingly: an ornate building with a lobby designed to make its audience feel that something extraordinary was about to happen inside.
Bob Hope came to Stockton regularly for decades. He counted among his friends Alex Spanos, the Stockton-born real estate developer and Chargers owner who was, by all accounts, the most prominent person in the city. Hope and Spanos had the kind of friendship that made Stockton a regular stop on Hope's calendar rather than a market to perform and leave.
Spanos donated money toward restoring the theater, and it was renamed the Bob Hope Theatre in recognition. The building reopened as a performing arts venue, concerts, touring shows, local events, one of the surviving movie palaces that the Central Valley still has standing.
It operates today under the name it was given in tribute, on the avenue named for the man who founded the city it anchors.
