Pussycat Theater 1984

Description:
Pussycat Theater, 5110 Telegraph Avenue, northeast corner of Telegraph Avenue and 51st Street, Temescal district, Oakland, Calif. Caption: "View of the subject property looking easterly across Telegraph Avenue. The District's easement requirements are within an existing arch culvert that lies under the front of the building."

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Date of Document:
1984

Document Author:
John Fenstermacher

Geographic Location:
5110 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, Calif.

Context:
Originally opened as a nickelodian in 1913 as the L. D. Purdy (named after its operator, Lawrence Dorman Purdy) and designed by locally prominent architect Alfred William Smith (1864 1933), the building housed a store on either side of the theater s recessed arch entrance. [Jennifer Dowling note, from an article published in the Oakland Heritage Alliance Newsletter, Winter-Spring 1999.\]The theater was remodeled in 1916 and renamed the Claremont. In 1939, the theater was completely modernized and its name changed to the Tower, where mainstream American movies and foreign films were screened. From 1913 to 1973, the theater stood in the middle of the east side of the 5100 block of Telegraph Avenue. The stores and upper story apartments to the immediate south of the theater were demolished circa 1973 when 51st Street was widened to serve as a feeder to the newly opened Grove-Shafter Freeway (Highway 24), thereby making the theater the corner building. Purchased in 1976 by a Los Angeles-based company that ran a national chain of adult movie theaters, it became the Pussycat. Damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and having become the focus of protests by Temescal residents who wanted to keep the X-rated theater from re-opening, the Pussycat remained closed until the City of Oakland demolished it in December 1998. The resultant vacant lot, the building viewable on the left in the photograph (formerly American Savings and Loan, and, later, Global Entertainment), demolished in 2016, and the parking lot behind both were combined into a single parcel on which the Nautilus Group is building a mixed use (multi-story residential over ground flood commercial) development. [Jeff Norman note]The architect for the [1939 Tower] remodel was Alfred J. Hopper, listed in city directories as a carpenter. Hopper was involved in other theater remodels, including earlier work on the Mission in San Francisco (1932) and the Uptown in Rockridge (1930). He later worked on the New Fruitvale