Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Oak Park's last surviving movie house was rescued by a neighborhood kid who made the NBA. The Guild Theater at 2828 35th Street in Sacramento dates to 1915, when Joseph Lewis designed and financed the Victor Theater on a site that had held the Oak Park Theater since 1903 - the largest of three theatres that once lined 35th Street. The names and fortunes cycled for decades: the Victor closed in 1926, reopened in 1931 as the New Oak Park Theater with 484 seats, closed again in 1947, and relaunched in 1952 as the Guild with a modern marquee - before sliding into adult films as the New Guild in 1969 and eventually shutting altogether, boarded up with two feet of standing water inside. The rescue came through St. HOPE, the community development nonprofit founded in 1989 by Oak Park native and NBA star Kevin Johnson, which acquired the derelict building and completed a full restoration, reopening the Guild in May 2003. The restoration preserved the theatre's Romanesque and Moorish Revival character - rounded arches, patterned brick, exposed interior walls - while rebuilding the auditorium as a 200-seat multi-use room with modern digital projection and stage systems. A second renovation in 2020 added a bar, a music studio and a new front lobby, and the programming now spans live music, film screenings, lectures, comedy and community events, most kept free or low-cost by design. The theatre anchors St. HOPE's 40 Acres complex at Broadway and 35th - a block that also holds Esther's Park, the Old Soul coffeehouse, Fixins Soul Kitchen and apartments - conceived as a cultural destination for the historically Black neighborhood. After 110 years the Guild's significance has inverted: once one theatre among many serving Oak Park's entertainment appetite, it is now the neighborhood's only survivor from that era and the deliberate centerpiece of its cultural revival.