SAN DIEGO -- During the summer of 1985, musicians Steve and Mary Karo played David to the well-heeled Goliath of this city's downtown redevelopment agency.
While Mary stood onstage floating the opening notes of a Bach air from her violin, husband Steve guided anyone who would listen past debris in the lobby, over gum-spackled floors and down a littered side aisle of the Balboa Theatre.
The once-thriving vaudeville house at 4th and E streets was shuttered, but its bright natural acoustics remained unchanged. "No matter how much the developers tried to denigrate it as a theater," said Steve Karo, "it was obvious when people got inside and saw it and heard the acoustics that this was a theater that should stay a theater."
Over time, the sound of Mary Karo's violin became a note heard 'round the city, turning doubters into believers. This month, after a decade-long redevelopment battle, 22 years of dormancy and a five-year, $26.5-million restoration, the Spanish Revival theater again houses live performances open to the public.
Ironically, the meticulously researched restoration was funded by the Centre City Development Corp., the redevelopment arm of the San Diego City Council that two decades before hoped to demolish the Balboa as it had other downtown theaters or to gut the building to make way for a design center anchoring the northeast corner of the Horton Plaza shopping mall.
"It's rare that a public entity funds such a robust theater restoration program," said Paul Westlake of Westlake Reed Leskosky, the Cleveland-based architect selected for the project in 2003.
The Karos, theater buffs and preservationists are unanimous in praising the quality and attention to detail governing the restoration. "It's just amazing that the very people we were fighting did a complete reversal and did everything absolutely right," said an ebullient, if exhausted, Steve Karo.
Civic leaders, the curious and the skeptical came to find out why the city agency would invest so much tax increment money bankrolled from the shopping center that had revitalized an ailing downtown into a rundown theater.
"We weren't just doing an expensive paint job. We had stripped the place down to its good bones, keeping the best of what was old and reworking the theater to modern expectations," said Gary Bosse, senior project manager for the Balboa, admitting to separation anxiety now that artists, audiences and patrons are arriving inside. Inaugural presentations culminate Thursday with a gala fundraiser to support subsidized performances by nonprofit arts groups in the Balboa.
