The Paramount and the Fox: Oakland's Palace Row

Two theaters stand three blocks apart on Broadway in downtown Oakland, and together they represent one of the finest concentrations of nineteen twenties and thirties theater architecture still intact anywhere in the United States.

The Fox Theater opened in nineteen twenty-eight, its art deco facade with Moorish and Indian temple-inspired details rising above Broadway at a moment when movie theaters were the dominant entertainment medium and cities competed for the most spectacular ones. The Paramount opened three years later in nineteen thirty-one, an Art Deco palace with a Wurlitzer organ and a lobby that has been described by architectural historians cited in the California History journal as among the finest surviving examples of the style in the country. The Paramount carries California Historical Landmark number eight eighty-four and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-three. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-seven.

Both theaters were built for Oakland's working-class and middle-class audiences. The same decade that produced them also produced the labor organizing on the docks below: the dockside longshoremen and the retail clerks who would eventually shut the city down in nineteen forty-six were among the people filling these seats on Friday nights in the early nineteen thirties.

Oakland has spent much of the past century being dismissed as San Francisco's less interesting neighbor. The two theaters on Broadway have been politely ignoring that characterization for nearly a hundred years.