movie palace

San Diego Symphony used its pandemic closure as an opportunity to gut parts of Jacobs Music Center, built in 1929 as a movie palace.

Buried in a bland mixed-use skyscraper in the dreary Financial District downtown, an aging, if glamorous, 1929 movie palace with rotten acoustics long served as the San Diego Symphony’s disagreeable home.

It was built in 1929 as the Fox Theatre — the third-biggest movie palace on the West Coast when it opened with visiting Hollywood royalty, including Jackie Coogan and Joan Crawford.

The orchestra’s home has been the Jacobs Music Center, a renovated movie palace with lousy acoustics in a dispiriting bank building.

Production designer Patrick Sullivan took care to ensure the theater felt authentic, sourcing seats from an old theater in Denver that had closed down, and constructing an ornate Art Deco movie palace simply for the purpose of destroying it.