The once majestic but now abandoned and dilapidated Alexandria Theater catches and holds my gaze as I walk toward my apartment and up 18th Avenue. The theater is massive, taking up a half a block, surrounded by trash that dances around it like pixies in the breeze, with broken windows but still a landmark, one I use to describe where I live when people ask. I say, “Behind the Alexandria” and it is clear. The building is cathedral like and its spire and towering “Alexandria” neon sign rises above the neighborhood proclaiming its dominance. This time I approach from the much less regal backside of the building and my multiple perspectives on the building conflict with each other. The columns along the walls and the spire of the marquee make the building resemble a huge unaware brontosaurus with its head near obscured by the mists of the night. I approach the large beast but the building only slumbers lazily like a dumb animal, too stupid to defend itself from the world that moved too fast for it to keep up with.
The numerals one, two and three remain on the side of the building next to the vertical Alexandria sign representing the number of restorations done to the building that the masses that have inhabited the seats of the theatre have witnessed as they watched first run showings of South Pacific, Apocalypse Now, Back to the Future and The Lord of the Rings. I think of the architects, two men that I find through research were named James and Merritt Reid and I imagine how they walked around inside the theater the day before it opened on November 26, 1923 inspecting what they had created, feeling the rush of power and success and thinking about how the building would be an important part in people’s lives, influence so many, be a visible land mark for decades to come, etc., etc., etc. Tonight, as I sneak up behind the behemoth I only think how ugly it is. It is empty, closed and abandoned since 2004, homeless men sleeping in front of the doors that once brought so many in to sit and take part in Sunday matinees every weekend, the Sabbaths. Now it smells of urine. It is extinct.
What would the architects say if they were alive to see their creation as it stands today boarded up and pathetic? What would people that live in the neighborhood now say to the Reid brothers if they could talk to them? What opinion do my upstairs neighbors have of the brothers? I ask this because I know the answer but want to be gentle. They don't have any opinion on the men, they're not on their minds, they hardly think anything of building itself. It stands as a dead tree would, one that you pass and think nothing of because it has no use to you. The point is that the architects have been forgotten. They are not worth thinking about because they are irrelevant. Architects are not immortal. They are not world creators because it was not the architect who created the building nor determined its downfall. It was the community. It was the demand from the neighborhood for a theatre and it was the loss of that demand that determined that the theatre would cease to exist. They building grew naturally out of the ground like a mushroom or sapling because the conditions were optimal for its success. When the neighborhood as a whole did not think of the building as necessary anymore it wasn’t and it was forgotten.
Great men are creators but it is more logical to call them catalysts. They are a part of the ecosystem, organisms that convert nitrogen into usable ammonia to stimulate growth. It is not the men’s desires that determine the growth, it is the ecosystem. These men are part of an equation and not THE equation. Men did take the lead and lend a hand in the creation of cities like San Francisco, Adolph Sutro, Charles Crocker, Alexander Leidesdorff, possibly the Reid brothers, they had the money and leadership ability to get their names recognized in the history of the city but it was not because of them that the city exists. It was many factors, the discovery of gold, the location of the bay as a safe harbor for transport of people and goods or the temperate climate that resulted in San Francisco growing into what it is today. It grew as an independent organism. No one person said “let there be here a great city!” It was not the power of money it was the approval of the population demonstrated in thousands making their home in the vicinity that determined the success and ultimately the character of the city.
Architects are a tool of the city, part of the chemical or molecular process of the evolution of the neighborhood which created itself through the conglomeration of multiple families and many individuals and dollars flowing, businesses being founded, businesses being successful or families failing. This resulted in the intersection of 18th Avenue and Geary Boulevard that the Alexandria inhabits now taking the shape that it does today. The theatre would be pushed out of use when other theatres evolved to take its niche, multiplexes, IMAX, 3D. It was not the architects desires being satisfied to have a theater built that was the reason for its construction. It was the demand of the populous that created the right conditions for the theatre to rise just as the conditions of humidity, soil composition, temperature levels and rainfall levels allow pine trees to grow on alpine slopes. Pine forests are successful not because a chipmunk forgets a seed in the dirt. It is the natural progression of life that allows for the creation, growth and death of the forest that determine how the world looks. Cities have a life of their own, independent from any one factor or desire. It is uncontrollable by any one being or deity. The Alexandria was created and eventually killed by San Francisco.
Today community organizers are determining if a four should be added to the one, two and three on the theaters spire. These are plans for a fourth resurrection, one that would turn the theatre into a multiuse pavilion with shops and housing taking the place of theatre seats. Is there a demand for this revival? The demands of the environment are the only powers that will determine what the skyline of the Richmond neighborhood will look like and without the conditions of the harsh and unforgiving natural ecosytem being favorable no one person will determine its fate. Men are powerless and weak against the earth.
