A look at 4th Avenue Theatre's fate

Are warm memories and historical conscience enough to save the downtown movie house?

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: December 18, 2005
Last Modified: December 22, 2005 at 01:57 PM

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol but every human thought has its page in that vast book. -- Victor Hugo

Never having been one to let a grand idea alone, I'll modify Hugo's notion for my own purposes: Architecture -- especially public architecture -- is a record of a city's thoughts about itself, written by many hands through time. Every storefront, colonnade and portico, every esplanade, plaza, plinth and pediment, every shopping mall and school, is like a page from a journal where the city's citizens have written what they think of themselves, what they want, what they believe they stand for.

The best way to support a grand idea like this is with a story, and in Anchorage, some of the best stories for this purpose seem to be attached to the 4th Avenue Theatre. For nearly 60 years, the theater's sign has been one of the most familiar features of the downtown streetscape, soaring like the prow of an art deco ocean liner above Alaska's cycles of boom and bust. The theater has passed through six owners' hands, has suffered an extended period of genteel decline and hasn't screened a feature film in nearly two decades. Still, it holds a powerful place in the city's collective consciousness as a monument to personal and collective history.

This status and this history have been cast in doubt by recent events, however. In August, real estate developer Robert Gottstein, the theater's most recent owner, announced he was putting the building on the block again. As the Daily News reported on Dec. 7, developer Joe Fang has tendered an offer as part of his plan to develop a 24-story, mixed-use tower on a lot immediately behind the theater building. Though in public conversations Fang has said he's sensitive to the city's preservation wishes, recent news accounts have indicated his plans might include construction of a three-story parking facility above the four-story theater as well as gutting the building to accommodate a health club. A groundswell of public opposition -- at this writing, still trying to organize itself -- has been forming.

Though the outcome is cloudy, one thing isn't: A new chapter is being written in the venerable building's history. Only time will tell whether this is the finale.

FIRST DATES, FIRST KISSES

Les Sheppard, a retired builder and developer, has gotten out in front of the grass-roots opposition to any plan that doesn't include theater preservation. Sheppard has tender memories attached to the 4th Avenue Theatre. He came to Anchorage in 1956 as an aircraft mechanic with the Air Force's 317th Fighter Group, when his daughters were 4 months old and 4 years old. Eight years later, on Good Friday, 1964, his girls were in the theater to see Disney's "The Sword in the Stone."

"When the quake started, my younger daughter, Lori, thought it was part of the movie," he says. "They didn't really know it was an earthquake until it went on so long. My older girl, Debra, got them out, and they stood under the marquee, holding onto a parking meter, and that's where they were when my wife got to them. When I finally got downtown, I found them there." The theater had made it through the quake practically undamaged.

Sheppard's eyes grow moist at the memory.

"People talk about the happiest day of their life," he says, "and for a lot of them it's the day their kids are born. For me, it's when I saw them there with their mother at the 4th Avenue Theatre."

Sheppard doesn't feel he's unusual in having a warm place in his heart for the theater.

"Really, this touches everybody," he says. "I've talked to people who waited in line to get into the theater when it first opened. I've talked to people who could say they got their first kiss in that theater or had their first date there."

'LITTLE JEWEL BOX'

It may be inevitable that a place where people have come for generations to dream together in the dark has acquired this patina of romance and nostalgia. But it's hard to imagine anyone getting misty-eyed about any of the modern multiplexes. Step into the 4th Avenue's lobby, just through the brass-and-glass doors, though, and you begin to understand what the fuss is about. Even in their worn condition, the theater's fittings signal a dramatic transition from the prosaic world of the street.

Begun in 1941 and completed in 1947 (with a long construction hiatus during World War II), the theater and its appurtenances were designed, according to the Cinema Treasures Web site, by architects A.A. Porreca and Marcus Priteca (also architect of Hollywood's Pantages Theatre) in the Art Moderne style. More streamlined than Art Deco, Moderne was characterized by "slick lines that conveyed movement, agility and speed."

In Anchorage, this was rendered with fluted and carved walnut woodwork, sinuously curving, coved plaster ceilings, polished Italian marble, hand-worked brass trim and custom chandeliers. The emphasis was on glamour over utility, but Alaska's natural and economic realities were not left out of the details. There are stylized custom murals rendered in gold-and-aluminum-leafed bas-relief, one to the left of the screen emphasizing Alaska transportation, another to the right praising the state's industries, another dedicated to the state's wildlife and a final work that depicts Mount McKinley. In the theater's ceiling, twinkling recessed "stars" mapped the Big Dipper and Polaris.

Interior designers Tony Heinsbergen and Frank Bouman were commissioned to create an interior that Heinsbergen subsequently referred to as "a little jewel box." If that seems a strange way to describe a place that could seat 960 people -- roughly 4 percent of Anchorage's population when it opened -- it nonetheless seems apt even 60 years further on. The curved walls, soft lights and details retain their sumptuous feel, combining to create the effect of a richly appointed cocoon. Not exactly what you'd expect in rough-edged Alaska. But that was the intention of "Cap" Lathrop, the man who built it.

MINING THE MINERS

The theater's story is truly inseparable from Lathrop's. Perhaps the first and foremost of Alaska's self-made industrialists, Lathrop was born in Lapeer, Mich., in 1865, the last year of the Civil War. He came to Alaska in 1896 with the last American gold rush. Lathrop founded his fortune -- as so many shrewd operators did then -- not on mining ore but on mining the miners. He came up as master of the steam schooner L.J. Perry and ran mail and supplies back and forth across Cook Inlet. From this beginning, he branched out, leveraging one investment with another, eventually adding such disparate enterprises as fish canning, trucking, banking, construction, oil, mining and journalism to his portfolio. He built the state's first concrete building in Fairbanks, owned the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and founded radio stations KFAR and KENI.

Lathrop also got briefly into the movie business, shooting "The Cheechakos," the first movie ever produced in Alaska, in 1923. His more enduring involvement in the entertainment business came through the string of movie theaters he built to feed the growing population's hunger for forms of entertainment that didn't involve firearms. In 1915, he built The Empress in Cordova. He later added Empresses in Anchorage and Fairbanks and then expanded the chain to include theaters under other names throughout the state.

He conceived of the 4th Avenue Theatre as the brightest jewel in this necklace of film palaces. Lathrop spared no expense to make it, as he put it in a statement on its opening, "the culmination of a sincere wish to bring to the people of Anchorage, and visitors from all parts of Alaska, a theater unexcelled on the American continent." It was his gift to the people of the state that had made him.

Lathrop called the 4th Avenue Theatre's opening day the happiest day of his life. Touted as the first million-dollar building in the state, it opened its doors on May 31, 1947, with a screening of "The Jolson Story." Gaps in the lobby's marble trim were hidden by white wicker baskets filled with gladioluses, and admission was $1.50.

After opening night, a ticket usually cost 80 cents, and Lathrop ordered that on special occasions such as the Christmas holidays, kids should be let in for free. He forbade sales of food and reserved the right to frisk patrons for contraband popcorn, claiming he wanted to keep his building up. His usherettes -- there were five -- wore velvet bolero jackets whose colors matched the theater's trim, and they carried flashlights to escort patrons to their seats. Unescorted kids had to sit in the section reserved for them down front; sight lines were preserved through oversized end-of-row seats in every other row that, in a pinch, could accommodate a couple.

Hollywood took notice: In 1949, "Twelve O'Clock High" had its world premiere there, as did "The World in His Arms"-- a tale concerning a rapscallion seal pelt poacher, a glamorous Russian countess, a villainous Russian prince and a race to the Pribilof Islands -- in 1952. For the latter film, actress Ann Blyth was in the audience, though her co-stars, Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn, couldn't attend. The 1964 quake left the building unscathed, and later that year, Anchorage audiences were able to come to the theater to see Richard Burton perform in "Hamlet" on Broadway via an "electronic-optical" link with New York.

The '60s didn't leave the theater entirely untouched, however. In June 1968, the sex and violence in "Bonnie and Clyde" occasioned a good deal of controversy after a screening at the theater.

In 1969, nearly 20 years after Lathrop died at age 85 in a mining accident, Wometco, a Miami, Fla.-based holding company, acquired the 4th when it bought the chain of movie palaces he had built across the state. Wometco operated the theater for the next 16 years, seeing it onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1981 but proving itself to be benignly neglectful in the face of time's wear and tear. Graffiti was starting to appear, carved into balusters and walls. The rugs were faded and worn, the Big Dipper and Polaris had long since stopped twinkling, and in a Sunday feature in May of 1983 -- just shy of the building's 36th anniversary, the Daily News' Sheila Toomey wrote that the theater, "like the rest of us ... ain't what she used to be. Her seats are sagging, her colors have faded and the Now Generation has passed her by." Just a year later, the theater reached what was perhaps its nadir when 28-year-old Gustav N. Peterson of Anchorage was caught by theater personnel ripping away chunks of Italian marble -- one of them 7 feet long -- from the theater's outer wall to resell them.

The next year, Anchorage real estate developer Joe Cange got wind of a plan by Anchorage Mayor Tony Knowles to form a partnership with Portland, Ore.-based Thomas E. Moyer Theatres and take the theater off Wometco's hands. The Knowles-brokered deal went through, though: The city paid $600,000 for the historic rights to the theater building to guarantee preservation of its facade and interior, while Moyer Theatres ponied up $1.4 million. Moyer stopped showing movies in mid-1985 to allow the city to refit the theater (to the tune of $500,000) and agreed to a $112,000-a-year lease so the municipality could sublease it to local performing arts groups while the Anchorage Center for the Performing Arts was under construction.

Not everyone was happy with the change. In November of that year, another Daily News item noted that "the Big Dipper (on the ceiling) no longer twinkles ... the monolithic side panels are covered with basic black and the chandeliers are in storage. ... Ah, destiny, whither the 4th Avenue Theatre?"

DEFAULT DAYS

Four years later, as so much else did in Alaska during those dark late-'80s days, things got worse.

Moyer Theatres defaulted on its bank loans and turned the keys to its theaters over to Key Bank, the mortgage holder. The bank sold the mortgage to San Antonio-based ACT III Theatres (a concern founded three years earlier by legendary TV writer and producer Norman Lear), and ACT III loudly insisted that the municipality should pay for repairs and refurbishment to bring the theater up to code. Various estimates placed the price tag for this work at between $250,000 and $850,000. These upgrades were not to be, however: a scant four months after it took over, ACT III also defaulted on its note, and in January 1990, the bank padlocked the theater's doors. In March 1990, Key Bank initiated foreclosure proceedings, which sent the city's $600,000 historic-rights investment up in smoke along with the preservation shield it had bought for the theater's facade and interior.

In April 1991, Anchorage Historic Properties Inc. entered into negotiations to try to save the building, but Mayor Tom Fink and the Assembly wouldn't authorize the $700,000 in city funds necessary to bring it up to code.

Finally, in August of that year, it looked like the 4th Avenue Theatre's angel was ready to come to its rescue. Anchorage-born real estate investor Robert Gottstein -- who as a child had watched movies in the theater for 40 cents -- bought the theater for $600,000 from the bank. He promised not only to repair the building "but to refurbish it, to make it as grand as it was intended to be." Gottstein laid out a plan to make the theater over into a five-star tourist magnet with a gift shop, showings of Alaska-themed movies and more. He reopened in 1992 and began renting the theater for catered banquets, concerts, parties and special events. At the time of the sale, Gottstein estimated it would require $1.5 million to bring it up to code. He estimates he eventually had to pour $3 million more than that into the building.

SWORD OF DAMOCLES

Fortune has not been kind, however, and Gottstein had to put the theater building back in play again this year. There's much to thank him for: The Dipper is twinkling once again, the chandeliers have been rehung, the murals are once again visible and resplendent, and the dust has all been swept out. Good carpets are on the floor, the building is up to code and anyone with a workable business plan will be able to set up shop in short order. But whether that will happen is an open question.

It's hard to get anyone to talk who is or might be directly involved in the deal that's currently hanging over the theater's future like the sword of Damocles. If you get Les Sheppard talking about the 4th Avenue Theatre, it's difficult to get him to stop.

"You wouldn't think of tearing down a museum because of the history in it, the art it contains," he says. "That's the way we need to think about the theater. The theater should not be sold to anyone in the private sector. That building is an icon; it's an example of what we were here in the '30s and '40s, how we started out. It has so much history concentrated in it, and so much has happened there to people that are in our city.

"People would come to this town back then from all over the state, and if there was a movie on, that's where they went. That's where the art was. The Big Dipper, the North Star in the ceiling and the art on the sides -- what people looked at then needs to be preserved today. It's up to us. It's our place to step forward and let the city own the property, let the people manage it."

There is much more -- a flood of hopes, of ideas, of emotion. Sheppard has been running all over town, meeting with, talking with, pleading and cajoling with anyone in power or in the chips who might be sympathetic to his cause. There are people with money who want a plan, people with a plan who have no money. In the meantime, Joe Fang's offer is sitting in the middle of Robert Gottstein's desk, and Gottstein has refused to comment for this article, citing "ongoing negotiations."

Time is of the essence. And time may be just what the advocates of a preserved 4th Avenue Theatre don't have.

Daily News arts editor Mark Baechtel can be reached at 257-4323 or mbaechtel@adn.com.