The State Theatre's Christmas Day

On Christmas Day of nineteen thirty-four, Modesto got a movie theater.

Not a repurposed storefront or a converted opera house. A purpose-built picture palace designed by S. Charles Lee, the Los Angeles architect who would eventually put his name to over four hundred theaters throughout California and Mexico. The State Theatre opened on December twenty-fifth with Dick Powell in Flirtation Walk, admission twenty-five cents, air conditioning advertised as a principal attraction to a farming community that spent its summers in triple-digit heat.

S. Charles Lee's theaters were Art Deco buildings, and the State was built in that mode: streamlined surfaces, geometric ornament, the kind of interior that was designed to remove the audience from ordinary life for two hours and place them somewhere that felt deliberately different. The cost of construction was one hundred thousand dollars. The local builder was a man named Harry B. Covell.

For decades the State functioned as Modesto's main movie house, running first-run features from the Hollywood studios that dominated American entertainment through the middle of the century. By the late twentieth century, the multiplex model had made single-screen downtown theaters economically unviable in most American cities.

In two thousand five, a nonprofit corporation took over the State and began a complete renovation. The work was finished in February of two thousand six. The theater was reborn not as a movie house but as a performing arts venue, a community space that now hosts live music, film screenings, and events. It remains a landmark of downtown Modesto.

The Art Deco facade is still there on J Street. The air conditioning still works. It was an amenity in nineteen thirty-four, and in Modesto summers, it remains one.