Esquire Theatre
323 E. Main Street,
Stockton,
CA
95202
323 E. Main Street,
Stockton,
CA
95202
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This opened as Yo Semite Theater on July 6th, 1892, and renamed Loew’s State Theatre on November 17th, 1920. Loews sells it to Fox West Coast in 1922 and closed in 1954. It reopened as the Esquire theatre on January 29th, 1955.
Opening ad as Loew’s State
I remember seeing God’s Little Acre and The Big Country there. Both were filmed near Stockton in the countryside. I knew the man who helped supply all the workers who built the sets. The Esquire was proud to present these movies since they involved Stockton. It was a large theatre with good projection and great sound.
The Lyric opened in 1914 or 15. In the 30s it became The National. In the 40s it was The Roxy. In the first part of the 50s it was the Lux. Toward the end it was called The Uptown. The Bank of Stockton Archives has the only picture of the Uptown just before it was destroyed. Most of the downtown theaters went through name changes and moves. There was an Esquire #1 then the Esquire #2 on Main St. near the Fox Californian. Through the 50s and mid 60s the downtown theaters (other than on the infamous skid row) were The Fox, The Esquire #2 and The Ritz about a block East on the South side of the Street. The Stockton opened in 1946 in the Miracle Mile District. Only the Fox now the Bob Hope Theater is still operating. The Stockton exists despite changes after a fire almost 40 years ago. Not showing features it had a shop and restaurant lobby area. Inside the auditorium the main floor was converted to a table area. Currently the entire facility is closed due to safety violations. May never reopen. I am working on a book about these 5 theaters and 3 of the drive ins prominent during the period 1950 to 1965.
There were two Stockton Theaters named The Esquire. The one pictured above was next door to a luggage store and Union Bank to the right. Mostly 2nd run and B films it had its hey days when it managed to first run all the James Bond films except From Russia With Love. Not a big auditorium it had a small balcony.
A photo of the original, San Joaquin Street entrance building of the Yosemite Theatre, probably taken in the 1890s, can be found at the very bottom of the Stockton Theatres Over the Years page on Wright Realtors' web site. There is also a photo of the original proscenium arch with its advertising curtain.
Farther up the page (theaters are in alphabetical order) there are photos of the Main Street entrance of the house as the State and as the second Esquire.
The Yosemite Theatre opened either in 1892 or 1893. The conversion of the house into the State Theatre took place in 1920. In a column listing projects in the works for 1920, the December, 1919, issue of the San Francisco-based professional journal The Architect & Engineer included Weeks & Day’s remodeling of the Yosemite Theatre in Stockton. The projected cost was $130,000.
I’ve come across something about the State Theatre that doesn’t fit in with other pieces of information I’ve found, especially the information from Boxoffice I cited in my first comment of August 12, 2009.
A 1922 issue of the architectural journal Pencil Points ran an article about movie theatres penned by architect Emil M. Mlinar, a former associate of C. Howard Crane. Among the illustrations is a photo captioned “Proscenium of Loew’s State Theatre, Stockton, Cal. Weeks & Day, Architects.” The photo is recognizable as the same theater in the photo from the S. Charles Lee collection to which I linked in the second comment on this page.
So, assuming that the magazine didn’t make a mistake, the State Theatre opened as a Loew’s house, and was designed by the same firm as the Loew’s State in Los Angeles and the Loew’s State in Oakland. I can’t find a Loew’s State listed for Oakland at Cinema Treasures, so either it isn’t listed or it’s listed under another name and is missing the aka. The Fox in Oakland was designed by Weeks & Day, but I’ve never seen anything suggesting that it was ever a Loew’s house.
The volume of Pencil Points with the photos can be seen at Google Books. Here’s the link to the Stockton photo. Scroll up a few pages to see the Oakland photo.
Thanks Joe, the Esquire theater I worked at was the renamed and remodeled Fox State Theater (see your Aug 12th post above). The only photo I’ve ever found of the Esquire is a post card I found on the internet.
Ken
ksutterfield: I’ve been searching Boxoffice Magazine for info about the Esquire, which is apparently not yet listed at Cinema Treasures, but so far I’ve only found a few references. The May 18, 1946, issue mentions in passing that the Esquire Theatre in Stockton was “nearly completed.” Work was delayed, though, and a short article in the December 14 issue that year announced that the Esquire had finally opened after thirteen months of construction.
The house had cost $200,000 to build and equip, and would be Stockton’s fourth first run theater. Boxoffice gave the seating capacity as 1190, and described the auditorium as being decorated with fluorescent murals having a Chinese theme. The article didn’t give the name of the architect, but the mention of blacklight murals makes me wonder if it might have been designed by Gale Santocono, who was very active at the time and used blacklight in theater decorations frequently. Even if he wasn’t the architect, he might have done the decoration for the Esquire.
I’ll keep looking for more info, but I don’t think Boxoffice ran any articles with photos of the theater. If they had, I’d probably have found them by now.
I have many memories of Stockton’s Esquire Theatre. It was sandwiched between the Ritz and Fox Theaters on Main St. I started working as a doorman at the esquire in 1960 when I was 16 years old. It was a great place for a kid still in high school to work as I had to stay until the last movie was over to close the theater and lock up, so I had lots of time for home work. I continued to work there until June 1963 when I joined the military. I believe the Esquire (or State) theater started life as a vadavile theater as it had an extensive back stage area behind the movie screen. Also dressing rooms and a large area above the stage for stage hands to work. Does anyone have any photos of the Esquire?
Checked the Google photos – Looks like it has been razed. The surrounding parking lots are now underconstruction with a new urban complex – very well designed – at first it looks like a series of old-style retail buildings. If only more modern urban construction looked like this.
The California Index has several cards about the National. It was built by the National Theatres Syndicate in 1931, located on Main Street at Stanislaus Street, and designed by the San Francisco firm Bliss & Fairweather. It was closed for a while in 1935, but Motion Picture Herald of May 18 that year said that it was being reopened by Joe Merrick of San Francisco. It was mentioned again in the February 2, 1936, issue, but the Index provides no details on that one.
The problem is I can’t find the National mentioned in Boxoffice at all, which makes me wonder if perhaps its name was changed.
I did come across a very interesting item in the April 24, 1967, issue of Boxoffice which said that the old Star Theatre on lower Market Street was being torn down after 50 years. It was the oldest surviving movie house in Stockton, and the last of four old movie theaters which had once thrived in the south end of downtown, the others being the Lincoln, the Imperial, and the Liberty.
I recall seeing this neighborhood in the late 1960s, just as they were beginning to demolish it for an urban renewal project. It was a splendid section of several square blocks of substantial masonry commercial and residential buildings. Glimpses of the area can still be seen in the original version of “All the King’s Men” in which Stockton sat in for Baton Rouge. The area appeared in a number of other movies as well, the last of them probably being John Huston’s noirish boxing movie “Fat City” which was filmed during the latter part of the demolition period.
The June 5, 1954, issue of Boxoffice had information about the State Theatre, as well as other theaters in Stockton:
I don’t find the Sierra or the Esquire listed at Cinema Treasures yet. I’ve found the Yosemite Theatre cited in the California Index as early as 1913.The Index also contains references to a number of other Stockton theaters not yet listed at CT, including a National Theatre, a Rialto Theatre, a Lyric Theatre, a Roxy Theatre, a Garrick Theatre, a Hippodrome Theatre, and an Avon Theatre. Some might not have been movie houses, and others might be only missing aka’s for listed theaters, but I think most are just missing.
The book “The Show Starts on the Sidewalk” does list S. Charles Lee as doing the remodeling in 1936.
Fair enough. I’ll add it to the lexicon with infotainment.
Ken, that was no typo. That was a spur-of-the-moment portmanteau coinage, but a Google search on the phrase indicates that I was not the first to ever use it. The results show two earlier examples.
Joe, I’m not making light of your typo, as I make enough of them myself, but “ruinewal” does sound like a combination of ruin and renewal, which is quite often the case.
Here’s an interior photo of the State, also dated 1936. Apparently, S. Charles Lee was approached about remodeling the place at that time, but there’s no record in his papers that he did the project. I never saw Stockton until about 1970, by which time the town had been struck by an urban ruinewal project. If the State was still there then, I don’t remember seeing it.