Journey Downtown
308 Main Street,
Vacaville,
CA
95688
308 Main Street,
Vacaville,
CA
95688
3 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 31 of 31 comments
You’ll all be pleased to know that this theater is coming back to life, again. It has been gutted, and I hope plans are to restore the old girl to original as possible. It will bare the name “Theater DeVille”. The 1952 facade appears to be in the process of being removed. Anything else at this time would be a pure guess. More later…..
I was in Vacaville on 4/14/2011 and was pleased to see the theater is still standing. It is closed, and there is paper on all of the lobby doors/windows. I was able to see into the box office, through to the office just off of the concession stand, and it does not appear that any work is going on inside.
I worked at this theater briefly around 1990, At that time the tenant, Ken Stumpf, was seeking funding to purchase and renovate the theater, but he never got it so he closed the place up.
I have photos, but the photo upload feature for this site appears to be iin upgrade mode, so I can’t add any of them.
A bit about the Clark Theatre is included in this blog at View link
Does anyone know anything further about it’s possible relation to the Strand Theatre, which preceded it in Vacaville?
The moviechurches.org website is actually in Swedish.
This theater has not been demolished. It opened in 1926 as the Clark Theater, owned by W.J. Clark. It was purchased by the Redwood Theatres chain in 1937, according to an item in Motion Picture Herald’s April 3 issue that year. A brief item in the February 16, 1952, issue of Boxoffice Magazine mentioned that theater architect Gale (misspelled “Gail” in the magazine) Santocono was preparing plans for improvements to the Vacaville Theater, and the owner at that time was named as Dom Isabells.
In 2005, the theater was owned by an outfit called New Life Production Company, and a woman named Leatha Dillon applied for a permit to convert the balcony of the theater into a living space (I don’t know if the balcony in question is a true balcony or just a stadium seating section.) There was considerable opposition, and the city’s planning commission denied the request. The record of the meeting about Ms. Dillon’s permit application revealed that, at that time, all but about 100 of the theater’s seats had been removed.
The February, 2008 article about possible restoration of the theater, linked above by Lost Memory (and yes, LM, it is the same theater), is now behind the Vacaville Reporter’s pay wall, so I haven’t read it, and I can’t find anything else about such a project on the Internet. Apparently the future of this theater is still undecided.
Google Maps street view of the building shows that it still has its marquee, box office, and attraction poster cases, and the facade bears a sign for the web address moviechurches dot com. This URL currently fetches some unrelated site, in German.
Here is a flyer from October 1987 advertising a well-known band:
http://tinyurl.com/2ew872