Golden Gate Theatre

The Golden Gate Theatre is a performance venue located at 1 Taylor Street at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, California. It opened in 1922 as a vaudeville house and later was a major movie theater. In the 1960s it boasted a Cinerama screen, but by the early 1970s it had declined and was showing blaxploitation films. It was restored and reopened as a performing arts venue in 1979.The theatre is part of the Market Street Theatre and Loft District which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.HistoryThe 2,300-seat Golden Gates Theatre was built in 1920-21 and was designed by G. Albert Lansburgh for the Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) theater circuit; Lansburgh also designed the nearby Warfield Theatre at about the same time. It opened in March with seven vaudeville acts appearing in one night's performance. A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle said of the new theater:suggests the outdoors, with none of the roofed-over feel that characterizes the average theatre. … It is like sitting under a bit of blue sky, so effective is the color suggestion.In the following decades, the theatre presented such performers as The Andrew Sisters, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Roy Rogers, The Three Stooges, Ethel Waters and Frank Sinatra, before RKO converted it in 1954 to present films, leasing it to the Cinerama Corporation.