Fabled history
Designed by San Diego architect William Wheeler and built in 1924 as a combination movie palace and vaudeville house, the Balboa Theatre served those functions and others. It was a Spanish-language cinema in the 1930s and later housed circuses and ice shows. With storefronts and a narrow bank of hotel rooms along its 4th Avenue side, the building became a flophouse for sailors during World War II and had a stint as a rent-by-the-hour bordello.
Though not built as a legit house for plays and musicals, the building has a fly loft for hanging scenery and feels to theater connoisseurs like a historic Broadway house, such as the St. James in New York.
Slightly reconfigured to meet disabled-access requirements, the Balboa now seats 1,300. A movable orchestra pit for 40 players makes the relatively shallow stage amenable to off-Broadway shows and smaller musicals.
Acoustical consultants McKay Conant Hoover deemed the reverberant acoustics excellent for instrumental and vocal music, but recommended dampening the resonance for amplified presentations. Acoustical banners, made of three layers of theatrical velour, can be electronically lowered over the sidewalls of the theater, Bosse said.
A pierced screen above the orchestra pit hides the theater organ. Ornate plaster grillwork in the ceiling accounts for the acoustical effects. And unique in Westlake's experience of 75 historic American theaters, a pair of 28-foot-high grottos flanks the proscenium. Within each is a sculpted mountain scene with a working waterfall -- painted plaster kitsch from one perspective or, perhaps, a knowing nod to the theater's namesake, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, credited as the first European to see the Pacific.
Acquired by the city in 1985 through eminent domain negotiations with the Russo family, which had operated it as a B-movie house, the then-1,530-seat Balboa was as derelict as the streets surrounding it. Its Mediterranean-themed architecture with towers, cupolas and a brightly tiled dome had determined the design motifs of the Horton Plaza mall rising nearby, but when the Karos and others coalesced their small movement to save it, the San Diego City Council had scheduled a vote to condemn the building.
The Karos' shoestring Save Our Balboa organization led to the Balboa Theatre Foundation, a more visible nonprofit headed by Jan Hicks Manos, a relative of the original architect, Wheeler.
