By Thomas K. Pendergast

A first step toward redeveloping the century-old Alexandria Theater at the corner of Geary Boulevard and 18th Avenue was announced by District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the City’s Office of Workforce and Economic Development (OEWD) and the landowner.

Now efforts to build more than 70 units of residential housing on the site can begin in earnest, while maintaining aspects of the building’s Egyptian Revival style from the golden era of grand movie palaces for future generations to enjoy.

“We are excited about this first step of formalizing our partnership with the City to develop Alexandria Theater into housing, and we are dedicated to ongoing efforts to preserve the theater’s history and character for the Richmond’s benefit,” said Yorke Lee, owner of TimeSpace Alexandria, LLC. “We thank Supervisor Chan for her continuing support, and we share her vision to complete this development as soon as possible.”

The Project Development Agreement (PDA) will be drafted by the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and facilitated by the San Francisco Planning Department. The preliminary design concept includes 76 units, including on-site affordable housing.

“The Richmond deserves more housing while having a piece of its history preserved,” Chan said. “We still have more work ahead of us to get to the finish line, and I am committed to continue supporting this process until we get this done.”

According to San Francisco Planning Department documents, the theater opened on Nov. 26, 1923, with a single-screen auditorium that had a unique, concrete bowl-shaped floor which seated 2,000 people.

In 1942, stepped seating was added to the auditorium and Art Deco interior ornamentation was installed, while a large blade sign and marquee were mounted outside along with terrazzo paving in the entry area.

In 1976, the auditorium was subdivided into three theaters with two smaller, upper level theaters on a new balcony deck.

The theater closed in 2004 and has been sitting vacant since then.

Throughout the next two decades, there have been at least two attempts to develop the property, but neither of them were successful.

The property was sold to a group of investors, Alexandria Enterprises LLC, one week before the theater closed, according to a 2011 San Francisco Chronicle article.

In 2010, the owners proposed keeping the existing building but expanding the second floor to include a restaurant, while keeping one of the theater screens to accommodate 221 to 250 seats.

On the ground floor, the plan called for the interior to be converted into retail commercial spaces, with a series of openings on the east façade to create store fronts for them.

Meanwhile, the marquee, blade sign and terrazzo flooring would have been preserved and restored.

The Richmond District’s supervisor at the time, Eric Mar, was quoted in the Chronicle article as expressing frustration that the property had been inactive and blighted. He saw this proposal as a “tremendous morale booster for shops and restaurants” in the area.

The architect for that project, Jonathan Pearlman, said the 1976 walls would be taken down and “the good news is that they just threw some walls up and didn’t do any damage to the theater.”

But, for reasons that remain unclear from the available documentation, that plan was never developed.

In 2015 the current property owner Yorke Lee, doing business as TimeSpace Alexandria, LLC, took possession of the property.

The district’s supervisor at that time, Sandra Lee Fewer, expressed her frustration at the lack of action to develop the theater.

“Birds are living in the marquee and it’s falling down. It’s just really an eyesore and we’re sick of it,” Fewer said at a community meeting in April of 2017. “Two gentlemen that live in the South Bay have bought it. Before the owners were in China. It was very hard to talk to them because they were just going through a middle man. But now, it switched owners about three or four times; these two owners I actually met.

“I did a walk-through of the Alexandria Theater with a historian from the Historic Preservation Commission,” Fewer said. “It’s really creepy now because there’s no lights and they pulled up all the seats. If you go behind the scenes, there are rooms that are like cages in the back.”

That same year, Lee submitted a proposal to the San Francisco Planning Commission for building a 13,322-square-foot “swim center” featuring two swimming pools on the first floor, a “learning center” on a second floor and a “business center” on a third floor.

A Conditional Use Authorization, the City’s way of green-lighting a development, was issued by the Planning Department in October of 2019.

But a few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and places like public swimming pools were among the first to get shut down.

After that, investor funding for the project dried up and momentum for the project faded.

With the property languishing in vacancy, partially due to the SF Planning Department scaling back operations while riding out the pandemic, the building’s disintegration, already well along, appeared to be further eroding the possibility of renovation.

Then an atmospheric river rainstorm with high winds slammed into the Bay Area and the blade sign was damaged to the point that the property owners took it down after inspectors from the SF Department of Building Inspection (DBI) issued a Notice Of Violation (NOV) on Jan. 10, 2023, because the sign was deemed a public safety hazard.

In March 2023, Chan submitted a resolution to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors calling on the Planning Department to give the building a “landmark” designation and the Board unanimously approved that resolution.

The following November, the City’s Historic Preservation Commission recommended the Planning Commission approve the landmark designation.

Meanwhile, DBI’s NOV had to be dealt with.

On Aug. 16, 2023, Lee and his attorney Nick Colla went before the Board of Appeals asking it to rescind the NOV, which cited “general negligence of maintaining and up keeping the subject historic property.”

“They’re doing what they can to work with the City to make this a safe and habitable and active space, but we’re hamstrung right now by our dealings with the City,” Colla told that Board, who rejected the appeal unanimously.

At that meeting, Board of Appeals Commissioner Alex Lemberg acknowledged that Lee had submitted permits to the Planning Department and DBI, and Colla said they were making a “good faith” effort to follow through with the work.

“I think there’s one of them that was completed out of at least a dozen here,” Lemberg responded, referring to a list in front of him. “I can’t agree with your assessment that that is a ‘good faith’ effort to act under these building permits.”

Tina Tam, the deputy zoning administrator for the Planning Department, said “building demolition by neglect is a big concern for this building. We have seen in the past when property owners allow a building to deteriorate to the point that demolition becomes necessary or restoration becomes unreasonable.”

In a recent interview, however, Colla flatly denied that this was the case.

“We’re dealing with that Notice of Violation they issued,” Colla said. “We’re working through the process with (the Planning Department’s) enforcement staff to make sure that we devise an agreed upon plan for the preservation of key historic elements of the theater, and we’re doing that with Planning’s enforcement staff and preservationists, while we are simultaneously working with OEWD and the city attorney’s office to come up with the terms of a Project Development Agreement.”

He pointed to the fact that Lee had already gone through this process before and was on the way to begin constructing the swim center when the pandemic hit.

“They went through the process of getting a Conditional Use Authorization (CUA) and it took several years to do so. It was cleared right before the pandemic and then everything in the world came to a halt, and during that process, during the time when things were down and the originally proposed project was no longer viable for a community center and a swimming pool,” he said. “It was back to the drawing board and then enforcement staff at that point decided to crack down on the property owner, as if he were just a neglectful property owner at that point.

“As far as applications and the processes that the ownership group has gone through to try to find a viable use for this space, I think there’s plenty of evidence there to suggest they had done so, and I think anyone stating anything to the contrary maybe isn’t taking into account the bureaucracy it takes to get a project off the ground here in the City.”