Pagoda Palace
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The boarded-up Pagoda Palace hosted a mural before being demolished.
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 Pagoda Palace Theatre
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| Former names |
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| Address | 1731 Powell Street |
| Coordinates | 37°48′03″N 122°24′40″W / 37.800803°N 122.410994°WCoordinates: 37°48′03″N 122°24′40″W / 37.800803°N 122.410994°W |
| Capacity | 1,000 |
| Construction | |
| Built | 1907–1909 |
| Renovated | 1928, 1937, 1967 |
| Closed | 1994 |
| Demolished | 2013 |
Pagoda Palace was a movie theater in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood on Columbus Avenue opposite Washington Square. It operated as a vaudeville theater and movie house before being torn down in 2013.
Signora Antonietta Pisanelli opened the theater in 1907 or 1909 as the Washington Square Theater, a vaudeville or Italian theater. It was built on the site of the first Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral, which was completed in 1888 but destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. The theater could seat 1,000 patrons for dramas and opera. In 1909, the theater hosted a benefit concert for Emilio Rivola. When "Sunny Jim" Rolph ran for mayor of San Francisco, several rallies were held for Rolph at the Washington Square Theater in 1911.
It was converted into a movie theater in 1928, and changed its name several times over its history, being called the Milano Theater (at the end of the 1920s) and the Palace Theater (in 1938 or 1939) before finally becoming the Pagoda Palace in 1967. As the Pagoda Palace, it specialized in Chinese-language films and hosted The Cockettes, a midnight drag revue, from 1969 to 1971. In 1986, the theater began showing films on a repertory basis as The Palace (dropping "Pagoda") after the Renaissance Rialto chain assumed operations. However, the building was vacant after 1994, following the failure of various conversion plans, including a Rite Aid drugstore, after government and neighborhood opposition. Rite Aid initially called for a 24-hour pharmacy at the site, and after withdrawing the proposal, civic leaders floated the idea of a combined cinema/cafe/bookstore complex.
In 1999, plans were announced to rebrand the building as Muriel's Theater, specializing in live theater. The front facade was removed in preparation for the rebranding, but the project fell through following the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000, and the temporary plywood became the public face of the Pagoda Palace. Joel Campos purchased the building in 2004 and proposed several different projects, none of which came to fruition due to neighborhood opposition, despite receiving approval in 2009 to convert the building into condominiums. By that time, the theater had been stripped of its interior and exterior furnishings and decorations, and retained very little historical integrity. The vacant building served as a campaign sign for Lynn Jefferson in 2008, a candidate to replace the termed-out Board of Supervisors member Aaron Peskin. Jefferson had adopted the slogan "Enough with the plywood" and posted it on the theater in reference to Peskin's policies and the notorious opposition to Pagoda redevelopment by the neighborhood group Telegraph Hill Dwellers, led at that time by Peskin's wife, Nancy Shanahan.
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