Hub Theater
727 Market Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94103
727 Market Street,
San Francisco,
CA
94103
2 people
favorited this theater
Yet another of San Francisco’s Market Street theaters. Its slogan was “Little Theater with Big Marquee”.
Contributed by
Garrett Murphy
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Recent comments (view all 10 comments)
The Hub mostly showed grindhouse fare before switching to “adults only” films in the mid-1960’s. It closed in the early 1970’s.
The Hub’s marquee can be seen in this 1967 photo, with “Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly” playing.
This theater is listed as the Silver Palace theater from 1908-1950. It was renamed the Hub in 1951 and closed in 1972.
There is a 60’s photo of the Hub theater here:
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Currently, the space formerly occupied by the Hub is part of a discount bookstore.
A theater with a sense of humor:
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Night view, 1967:
http://206.103.49.193/sf/htm/sf285.htm
Sadly, the Hub and several other theatres on the block were put out of business by the forthcoming Yerba Buena Center project. Which took years to resolve in the courts while these theatres were boarded up.
At the end all the theatres in this block were showing porn theatres and the city took them over under eminent domain and for awhile the city owned fully operating porn theatres!
I recall Herb Caen making a note of it in one of his columns.
I seem to recall reading that at their height there were 40 or 50 movie theatres operating at the same time on Market Street. A friend of mine says he managed to see at least one movie in each of the theatres on Market Street in his youth.
George Senda
Concord Ca
A dear friend of mine, Jeff Chapman, lived in San Francisco from 1977 through 1983. He made it his 1981 New Years resolution to go into every standing theatre structure in SF before the year was out. He almost accomplished his goal but was never able to get inside the El Ray, Harding, or Balboa. Jeff even walked around parking lots where theatres had once stood, such as the Paramount and El Capitan. At that time there were a couple of former theatres he didn’t know about because they had been converted to other uses, the Gap was one of them.
Jeff now resides in Champaign, IL.
A Kimball theater organ was installed in the Silver Palace Theater in 1910.
Allen Ginsberg took this photo of fellow Beat Generation icon Neal Cassady and his girlfriend of the moment, under the marquee of the Hub, in or around March of 1955.
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