Del Mar Theatre
1124 Pacific Avenue,
Santa Cruz,
CA
95060
1124 Pacific Avenue,
Santa Cruz,
CA
95060
13 people
favorited this theater
Opened on August 14, 1936 with “China Clipper”, the 1,521-seat Del Mar Theatre has served the college town of Santa Cruz, California for almost 65 years.
After years of struggling through dollar nights and intermittent attendance, the Del Mar Theatre was sold in 1999 and closed.
After an extensive renovation and restoration, the Del Mar Theatre reopened in February of 2002.
Contributed by
Tom Mayer, Jacob Hunter
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Recent comments (view all 34 comments)
This is the Del Mar at night.
Here is another November 2008 photo of the Del Mar.
A December 2008 photo is here.
This is a nice February 2009 photo.
No March or April photo but here is one from May.
A photo from January 2010:
View link
The name in the architect field is misspelled. It should be Chavalis, but I’m not sure he was actually the architect in any case. As far as I’ve been able to determine, William Chavalis was a painter who worked with Gale Santocono. Chavalis painted murals in the Cascade Theatre in Redding, California, among others.
I’ve also been unable to find any references indicating that the firm Salih Brothers designed any buildings. They were general contractors operating a major construction company, and also operated at least one theater themselves (the Center in Fremont, California,) but I can find no evidence that any of them were architects or even designers. Their own theater, the Center, was designed by A. A. Cantin. It, too had murals by William Chavalis.
When I first started working at the Del Mar in 1986, the theatre’s GM at the time, Joe, gave me a ~80 page thesis paper done up by a UCSC student about the history of the Del Mar Theatre, for its 50th anniversary. I may still have it in storage somewhere, but considering some of my stuff may still be in storage in Los Angeles at my dad’s place, it might take a while to locate.
A questionnaire (PDF file here) prepared for the AIA by the office of architect J. Lloyd Conrich in 1946 lists two theaters among the projects for which he was architect or was associated with others: the “Shasta Theater” (the Cascade Theatre) in Redding and the “Theater del Mar” in Santa Cruz. Both houses were built for Golden State Theatres.
A 2001 post by Warren E. Bechtolt on a message board says: “Research from AIA lists over 190 projects designed by Conrich, 31 of which are theatres.” The post doesn’t name any of these theaters other than the Cascade, but now we know there are at least two survivors among them. Farther down the message board thread the architect’s son, Bob Conrich, posted that “…all of his original tracings are archived at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.” If someone in the Bay Area has access to the collection, maybe they could compile a list of Conrich’s theater designs for us.
few July 2012 photos can be seen here and here.