Church’s exit offers new hope for SF’s historic El Rey Theatre

After occupying the El Rey for 39 years, A Place for Jesus, a Pentecostal church, has vacated the building, bolstering a longtime neighborhood dream that the neglected icon could be reborn as a community arts center or theater. While the Streamline Moderne theater has long been a shoo-in for landmark status, California law stipulates that a building serving as a church cannot be designated as historic unless the church agrees to the designation, which A Place for Jesus never did. The news comes as Ocean Avenue has attracted a wave of investment over the past five years, including a Whole Foods and four new apartment complexes totaling more than 300 units. Yet stretches of the retail thoroughfare have languished, especially on the western end of the strip where El Rey is located. “A restored and active El Rey is really the final piece needed for Ocean Avenue’s revitalization,” said Alexander Mullaney, a neighborhood resident who publishes the Ingleside-Excelsior Light newspaper and had worked for the theater’s preservation. Opened in 1931, the 1,800-seat El Rey was designed by Timothy Pflueger, whose firm was behind landmarks such as the Castro Theatre, the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and the Pacific Telephone Building at 140 New Montgomery St. in San Francisco. A Chronicle account of its opening described the El Rey’s Spanish Colonial Revival style as “richly decorative,” with a “gallery of mirrors” adorning the lobby. For decades the theater’s tower — visible from Mount Davidson to Merced Heights — provided a beacon in the often fogbound neighborhoods of Ingleside Terraces, Mount Davidson Manor and Balboa Terrace. The theater was also the birthplace of the Gap, which occupied the building’s retail space when the clothing company got started in 1967. Tim Frye, historic preservation officer for the city Planning Department, emphasized that any new structures built on the property would have to be consistent with the U.S. secretary of the interior’s standards for the treatment of historic properties. At the Historic Preservation Commission meeting, Daniel Weaver, executive director of the Ocean Avenue Association, said the new ownership, along with the step toward landmark status, represents a long overdue fresh start for the El Rey.