Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

A movie palace saved from demolition-by-neglect became one of the world's most intimate opera houses. The California Theatre at 345 South First Street in downtown San Jose opened in April 1927 as the Fox Theatre - Hollywood stars attended the premiere of An Affair of the Follies with it-girl Billie Dove - designed by Weeks and Day, the architects of Oakland's Fox and San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel, and hailed on opening day as the finest theater in California. Vaudeville, 3D and Cinemascope cycled through before the house closed in 1973 and sat dark for three decades. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency bought the building in 1985 to preserve the city's largest surviving downtown movie palace, but salvation waited until 2001, when a roughly 75-million-dollar restoration began - the Packard Humanities Institute funding over a third - that rebuilt the auditorium for live performance, added a three-story office wing to Market Street, new rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms and a side stage, and meticulously revived the Jazz Age interiors. The theatre reopened in September 2004 as one of the best-preserved 1920s picture houses in America. Resized from its original 1,848 seats to 1,122 across just twenty orchestra rows, a grand tier and a mezzanine, the California now ranks - as its resident companies like to note - in the select company of Glyndebourne and Venice's La Fenice among the world's most intimate opera houses. Opera San Jose and Symphony Silicon Valley (Symphony San Jose) make their homes there, and the annual Cinequest Film Festival returns the room to its cinematic roots, complete with two Wurlitzer organs commissioned by the Packard Humanities Institute - a full theatre organ behind the auditorium grillwork and a second in the First Street lobby. The SoFA district location surrounds the landmark with the gallery, restaurant and club scene of San Jose's liveliest quarter, making the California the ornate centrepiece of downtown's cultural revival - a 1927 fantasy interior where the music now happens live.