William Fox built his theaters to overwhelm. The San Francisco Fox opened just two years after The Jazz Singer inaugurated the talkie era, and Fox understood that the new medium needed palaces worthy of its ambitions. Thomas Lamb designed an interior of gilded plasterwork, crystal chandeliers, and soaring ceilings that borrowed from European opera houses and outdid them in scale. The 4,651 seats filled for both films and the elaborate stage shows that accompanied them -- live orchestras, dance numbers, and variety acts that preceded the feature presentation. Going to the Fox was not watching a movie. It was attending a spectacle.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Fox adapted to the age of widescreen formats, representing cinema's attempt to compete with television through sheer visual scale. But the economics of a 4,651-seat theater in downtown San Francisco were becoming untenable. Attendance had been declining since the late 1940s, and by the early 1960s the theater was losing money. A voter referendum in November 1961 to have the city purchase the Fox failed decisively. The building that had been a palace had become a liability.

The Fox Theatre was demolished in 1963, replaced by a building that no San Franciscan would describe as an improvement. The loss galvanized the preservation movement in San Francisco, becoming a cautionary example cited by activists fighting to save other threatened landmarks. The Fox's destruction demonstrated that architectural significance and community affection were not, by themselves, enough to save a building -- economic forces, real estate pressure, and the simple indifference of decision-makers could reduce a masterpiece to rubble in weeks. The Fox joins a national catalog of demolished movie palaces that represents one of the great losses of 20th-century American architecture.