When the American Conservatory Theater restored the Strand Theater, excessive attention to detail was paid. There is a "scar" on the floor to commemorate a demolished marble staircase, a neon sign restored at no small expense, and even the T-bars in a newly exposed wall received some special care.
"We liked that it looked sort of archaeological," Don-Scott Cooper, General Manager of A.C.T., told me. "But we had to fireproof them, and the paint only comes in white."
Rather than leave big white splotches on the wall, Cooper tasked one of the company's scene painters to photograph the steel, fireproof them, and then repaint them to match the weathered state they were in at the beginning of the renovation.
"It's the best trompe l'oeil you'll see on Market," Cooper said. (Disclosure: I was a bartender at A.C.T. for two seasons.)
The ghosts of dead movie theaters — most of which (like the Strand) started out as reputable only to decline into seedy — haunt Market Street. Built in 1917, the Strand went through numerous incarnations before its porn-palace phase, and had languished unused since 2003.
"The goal was to make a space that engaged with the neighborhood as much as possible," said Aaron Jensen, an architect on the project. "And it really brought the life to a unique spot, and made this lobby almost a theatrical room in and of itself. It was immensely challenging, but it also framed the problem in a way that I don't think you could have conceived of if you had a blank slate."
During my brief tour, I stood on the "diving board" that overlooks the lobby, peered up at the trap door beneath the stage, observed a slightly passive-aggressive note in the dressing room kitchen ("Dirty dishes in the sink triggers crippling depression in kittens"), and checked out an array of props on a table, arranged for Love and Information, a show with 70 scenes and 150 characters. Because a rehearsal was underway, I didn't ascend to the roof — which A.C.T. calls the "Rueff," after Rusty Rueff, a donor and chairman emeritus of the Grammy Foundation — but I did see artwork that long preceded A.C.T.'s tenure which it kept: graffiti of a pierced punk holding a hypodermic needle. It's a hallmark of another, bygone SOMA.
Conscious of the displacement battles playing out all over the neighborhood, and of the need to serve its existing population, A.C.T. didn't want to rehabilitate a building only for it to see use at night. So it installed a café.
"My projections are to break even," Cooper said. "But if we don't lose any money, we can keep the space open during the day."
Of course, the Strand is a theater above all else. Complementing A.C.T.'s programming at the nearby Geary Theater, the Strand will stage two productions a season, each of them for 10 weeks. (That's much longer than the three-and-a-half weeks for most shows at the Geary.)
In the end, Cooper is proud. "We've taken a derelict building and turned it into a vibrant performing arts space," he said. "We didn't kick people out of housing. We took something dilapidated, a part of S.F. history, and revitalized it. It's rare that you have a finished building that looks like the renderings. It looks exactly like they said it would look."
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