Fox Theatre - Gothic Dreams on Broadway

Photo: Ramesh lalwani, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on Redwood City History Walk, a free self-guided tour.

Look up at the pointed arches and fancy tracery of this theater front. It opened on January 2, 1929, as the New Sequoia Theater, a movie palace for a town that was growing fast. San Francisco architects Reid and Reid gave it a Gothic look outside and a Moorish feel inside.

Within months the Fox West Coast chain bought it, and the name you see today stuck. In 1950 it closed for a few months and reopened for live shows, and it has gone through good times and bad since, including a foreclosure in 2009 before new owners reopened it the next year. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

This lot had a history before the theater. The Lathrop House you just saw first stood on this block, and the Path of History notes that the town's public grammar school once occupied the site. Watch for the Path of History plaque just past the marquee.

Getting here: Walk back down Hamilton Street to Broadway; the Fox is across Broadway from Courthouse Square at 2215 Broadway.

Did you know?: Sequoia High School began in 1895 on the third floor of the old grammar school, then had its own building on Broadway near here from 1904 until it moved to its present campus in 1924.

Photo op: From Courthouse Square, shoot across Broadway to get the full Gothic facade and the marquee in one frame.

Fox Theatre - Gothic Dreams on Broadway

Stops on this tour