Empire Theatre
1130 1st Street,
Napa,
CA
94559
1130 1st Street,
Napa,
CA
94559
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According to the Oakland Tribune, the new Hayes Theater was a casualty of the April 18, 1906 earthquake but there are no reports on how long the theater had been open. Finally, on November 6, 1906, it was reported that the $34,000 Hayes Theater had reopened with vaudeville. It was noted that Walter J. Cuthbertson, who planned the MacDonough Theatre of Oakland, designed it for John Hayes, the owner.
The 1924 Sanborn Insurance Maps listed it as the Empire Theatre but there are reports that it was demolished the same year. It was still listed on The Film Daily Year Book of 1926 with 650 seats and the Gordon Building, which still exists today, was built on the site in 1929.
Contributed by
rpierce
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The Empire Theatre is mentioned a few times in trade publications in the 1910s. In 1916, the house was sold by Dave Solari to an Alois Fischer. There is a reference to Fischer’s Empire Theatre in 1917. By August, 1919, the Empire was being operated by Blumenfeld & Knox, who were having plans prepared for a new theater. I haven’t found what became of that project. In March that same year, the American Photo Player Co. had sold the Empire a Beethoven model organ.
A couple of articles in The Napa Valley Register have some information about the house. This article about the 1906 earthquake says that the Hayes Theatre was built in 1904. It also says that after the earthquake “[b]ricks of the destroyed Hayes theater building, at First and Coombs streets, littered its interior and the surrounding streets. While the building appeared to be a complete loss, the owner reconstructed the Hayes with a new infrastructure of iron and wood trusses.”
Another article indicates that the Hayes Building was not demolished in 1924, but was purchased by Samuel Gordon and later extensively remodeled. The NRHP Registration Form for the Gordon Building also says that some of the Hayes Building survived:
It sounds as though the auditorium’s walls were kept, but the roof was removed and a floor of offices built above the retail stores that were put into the former auditorium space. A new facade replaced the back wall of the theater’s stage house fronting on Coombs Street.