The Tower District: What a Neighborhood Saves
Near Fresno, California
The Tower Theatre at the corner of Wishon and Olive opened in nineteen thirty-nine, and it is still there. That simple fact, the survival of a single art-deco movie palace in a medium-sized California city, anchored the preservation of an entire neighborhood.
The Tower District occupies roughly a mile of Olive Avenue on Fresno's north side, and its built environment represents something increasingly rare in Central Valley cities: a walkable commercial corridor that retains the scale and architectural character of the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties while functioning as an active community hub. Independent restaurants, bars, music venues, and specialty shops occupy storefronts that have not been torn down and replaced with strip mall structures. The theater at the center of it has been running film continuously, with breaks for renovations, for more than eighty years.
How this happened in Fresno, a city where mid-century urban renewal demolished large portions of historic downtown and where suburban development pressure has been intense, involves a combination of neighborhood organization beginning in the nineteen eighties and the listing of the Tower Theatre itself on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-two.
The district has also functioned as a center of Fresno's LGBTQ community since the nineteen eighties, a geographic concentration of bars, community organizations, and cultural events that created a visible public presence in a city where that presence had previously been dispersed or invisible. The Tower District Pride Festival, held annually on Olive Avenue, has been running for decades. Its continued presence in a relatively conservative regional political environment represents a specific kind of tenacity that the physical preservation of the neighborhood has made possible.
What the Tower District demonstrates is the relationship between physical preservation and community sustenance. The buildings created the condition for the community. The community created the demand that kept the buildings. The theater is still showing films.
