Rancho Drive-In
Federal Boulevard,
San Diego,
CA
92105
Federal Boulevard,
San Diego,
CA
92105
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Approx. address for this drive-in was 1515 Euclid Avenue. The entrance is now McDonald’s!
This opened on January 28th, 1948. Grand opening ad in the photo section.
Thanks S.S. looks like it.
Here’s Federal Blvd and Euclid intersection circa 1964. A large drive in appears at the SE corner of the intersection.
http://www.historicaerials.com/?poi=11933
From 1948 a photo that captured a partial view of the Rancho Drive In marquee along with a man standing underneath.
At the corner of Euclid and Federal there is the nearly vacant Metropolitan Shopping Center. I would bet that that’s the former location of the Rancho Drive-In. Either that or the grounds of Cox Communications across the street.
Here is the link for the San Diego Weekly Reader web page. According to that page, the Rancho in San Diego opened on January 28, 1948. The introduction above shouldn’t need too many alterations to convert this listing to the Rancho in San Diego.
I just noticed that the link I posted to the San Diego Weekly Reader web page at 8:46pm last night no longer works. I suggest a Google search on “San Diego Rancho Drive-In” (but without the quotation marks) to find it (it’s the first result.) It’s way easier than trying to use the Reader’s internal search function.
The Life Magazine photos are definitely of the Rancho Drive-In in San Diego. The screen tower and its mural are easily recognizable in both the 1948 Boxoffice Magazine photos and the photos on the San Diego Weekly Reader web page. I don’t know how the editors of Life managed to displace the theater more than five hundred miles from its actual location.
This listing is most likely a duplicate of the El Rancho in South San Francisco. If the Life Magazine photos above show the Rancho Drive-In in San Diego, I would just change this listing to San Diego otherwise it could end up being deleted as a duplicate listing. I don’t know the exact address for the Rancho in San Diego, but the location given is Federal Boulevard.
Just weighing-in with a little observation here: I have never heard of a Rancho (or El Rancho) drive-in in San Francisco. This is not to say there may not have been one. Jack Tillmany’s Theatres of San Francisco makes no mention of it. More than this, though—the photos show a terrain that is just too flat behind the screen for anywhere within San Francisco. Also, the design of screen tower architectural embellishment is of a style and elaborateness I have never seen in the Bay Area—thinking back to drive-ins I either saw or viewed photos of. There was an EL Rancho in San Jose, but its screen tower had a cowboy on horseback, let alone the EL in the name. The Rancho in question looks like a type that would have been built in Southern California and areas throughout the Southwest.
Apparently the Life photos are of the Rancho in San Diego. The San Diego Weekly Reader has this web page about the area’s drive-ins, and the Life photos of the Rancho are among the illustrations. There’s considerable information about the Rancho there, too.
More photos appear in the April 24, 1948, issue of Boxoffice. It’s unmistakably the San Diego Rancho that Life mistakenly places in San Francisco.
I can’t find the Rancho in San Diego listed at Cinema Treasures yet, so the location for this page could just be corrected to San Diego. The only address I can find for it is Federal Boulevard at Euclid, San Diego, 92105. That would be just about 5100 Federal. Google satellite views show that the land has all been developed for other uses, so the Rancho Drive-In has been demolished.
Cinematour gives the opening year for the Rancho in San Pablo as 1952. How about the Rancho in San Diego? It’s also possible that this drive-in was in another State. Life Magazine is pretty loose with their locations.
I don’t think this drive-in was in San Francisco. The Life Magazine photo collection is pretty loose with its locations. Once caption on a photo of a theater in Ventura places it in Los Angeles, for example.
There was an El Rancho Drive-In in South San Francisco, already listed at Cinema Treasures, but I don’t think this is the same theater. The name on the screen tower is Rancho Drive-In, not El Rancho Drive-In.
There’s a possibility that the photo depicts the Rancho Drive-In in the east bay suburb of San Pablo. This Rancho Drive-In was mentioned in Boxoffice Magazine as early as 1951. I’ve been unable to find out if the Rancho in San Pablo was operating in 1948, and I can’t find any photos of it on the Internet, so I can’t be sure that the drive-in in that photo was the one in San Pablo, but I’m 99% sure there was never a Rancho Drive-In in the city of San Francisco.