by Russell Boniface
Associate Editor

How do you . . . keep the style and flair of a 1920s theater while updating it for contemporary use?

Summary: The historic Balboa Theatre in San Diego, a 1920s structure that blends Spanish Revival and Mediterranean styles, reopened this month as part of the revitalization of the city’s Gaslamp Quarter. The 44,000-square-foot theater, on the National Register of Historic Places, is part of the Gaslamp Quarter redevelopment by the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC), a nonprofit corporation created by the City of San Diego. The $26 million restoration project took several phases and dates back as far as 1986. Phoenix-based Westlake Reed Leskosky led the restoration.

The ochre-colored Balboa Theater, named for Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, is replete with allegory celebrating the Spanish explorer, beginning with the exact number of seats to match the year Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean—1513. The building had undergone renovation since its opening in 1924, but had remained idle since the 1980s. The CCDC acquired the property in 1985 and, in 1986, called upon Westlake Reed Leskosky, with its expertise in old movie house restoration, to begin the study of the multi-phase Balboa restoration.

Succotash of styles created an architectural fantasy
“It’s been a wonderful project,” says Paul Westlake, FAIA, managing principal of Westlake Reed Leskosky. “The Balboa is Spanish Revival but there are a number of Mediterranean influences. It’s almost the Baroque period of Classicism in America—maybe the last of the Beaux Arts buildings. It’s a succotash of styles. The historic movie palaces, now occupied by nonprofits, were developed at the time by private developers. They wanted to compete by attracting visitors with architectural fantasy.

“I can’t think of another building type with such exuberant architecture,” Westlake continues. “It’s uncommon to find a movie palace of this style where it belongs. The form is rectilinear, a different feeling and acoustic profile than any other historic theater we’ve worked on. All of our other movie palaces seem to be splayed, more fan-shaped. Maybe it was a necessity of the site, but its form and acoustical profile are unique.”

Restoring the ceiling, walls; décor ties into acoustics
As the restoration proceeded, Westlake and his team discovered the inventive design aspects in the Balboa audience chamber, which they wanted to maintain. “The theater is ornate in its chroma,” he says. “The walls of the audience chamber are lavender, dusted with light bronze powder. It has rich purples, saturated blue-greens, and red-oranges, yet it holds together. The colors are playing off each other in a rich way against a soft background.”

Westlake says the original gilded ceiling and wall plaster panels, designed for enhanced acoustics, were preserved and restored. “The ceiling features perforated plaster panels, like a screen, while concave perforated plaster stretches across the proscenium to tie together the side walls,” he explains. “The side walls are panelized with vertical pilasters every 18 feet, and between those are decorative, stenciled tapestry patterns and ornamental paint. It’s intricately painted and almost Moorish in its pattern work, which we matched in our carpet pattern design.” Westlake also worked with Evergreen Studio, a New York-based conservator, on a high-tech restoration of the patterns and colors to the Balboa “grand drape” based on an inconclusive black-and-white 1920s slide image.

Restored ornamental plaster fountains are recessed into the side walls above the audience chamber flanking the stage where the organ pipes would normally go. The fountains serve as a metaphor to Balboa’s ship at sea. “We had never seen fountains in a theater’s side walls,” Westlake says. “The organ was actually suspended in a loft above the floor stage and orchestra floor.” The Balboa Theatre Foundation is restoring the original organ, one of five of its kind in the country, for the loft.

“The decorative scheme, placement of the organ, and the chamber are all related to the mechanical and acoustical systems,” Westlake notes. “There’s also a resonant chamber above the visual plane of the ceiling eight feet below the concrete roof that expands the acoustical volume of the theater. All the surfaces in the house are hard to reverberate sound.” Westlake says that the firm wanted to create absorption for amplified sound for various events. “We created fabric drapes that coil around a spool. We cut an aperture in the ceiling, close to the side walls. The spools are stored above the visual ceiling and you can lower these drapes between the pilasters to any height. You can tune the hall acoustically and make it selectively more absorptive. A portable orchestra shell was also designed for the large orchestra pit to increase sound energy in the theater.”

Seismic refit; every cubic foot needed
To meet seismic requirements, the audience chamber was reinforced, and because of the historic plasters it had to be strengthened from the outside in. The audience chamber, stage, offices, and lobbies were updated, and mechanical infrastructure had to be well coordinated through the basement and a side wing in order to fit. “The hardest part was the theater’s small square footage—there was no opportunity to expand in any direction,” Westlake says.

Westlake Reed Leskosky also did exterior restoration, starting with removal of the non-original façade coating to bring back the original ochre color. Exterior restoration also included the wood windows and iron work, the vertical blade sign and horizontal marquee, portico walls and windows, and a rotunda façade with Balboa’s ship rendered in blue tile.