The neighborhood at Olive and Wishon Avenues had been developing into a shopping district since about 1923, and talk of building a theater there began as early as 1927. It took three proposals before one stuck. The first, announced in the Fresno Bee on December 3, 1938, was a collaboration between Fox West Coast Theater Corporation and local utility magnate A. Emory Wishon -- a $200,000 house similar to Lee's Ritz Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles, to be built on a full block owned by the Wishon Estate. At the time, the property was a playground. A second plan by architect Thomas F. Chase called for an even larger structure on the same site but was abandoned. A third proposal, a modest $65,000 theater designed by William David for Redwood Theatres, never materialized at all. What finally got built was a compromise: codenamed "The Ritz," it cost an estimated $100,000 and occupied a fraction of the original footprint. Building permits were issued on May 11, 1939, and construction began immediately.

The theater was formally dedicated as the Tower Theatre on December 14, 1939, with a private screening of the film Balalaika for local dignitaries and Fox Theaters executives. The public got in the next day, watching Dancing Co-Ed and Henry Goes Arizona. The building was not technically certified as complete until January 29, 1940 -- there had been a push to occupy it before Christmas. Inside, the Streamline Moderne design was unlike anything else in Fresno. Dutch-born muralist Anthony Heinsbergen painted the ceiling and walls with "Leda and Swan" and "Vine" motifs using fluorescent paint illuminated by ultraviolet lights -- only the second theater in the United States to attempt the technique, after Lee's own Academy Theatre in Inglewood. A centrally placed etched-glass bas-relief panel, a near-replica of Gaetano Cecere's 1927 "The Huntsman," caught the light near the entrance. The auditorium sat at a 45-degree angle to the streets, with the arrowhead-shaped building's two wings given over to retail space.

A. Emory Wishon died in 1948, and his estate sold the theater property to a Fox subsidiary. For a time, business continued as usual. The house was converted to CinemaScope in 1954, which required removing the original false proscenium stage -- a loss that nobody at the time considered particularly significant. First-run films played through the 1970s. But by 1980, the Tower Theatre could no longer compete with the multiplexes spreading across Fresno's suburbs, and it switched to repertory programming. Foreign films followed. Then nothing. By 1989, the theater was deeply in debt, and running films of any kind was no longer economically viable. The projector went dark. The building that had given a neighborhood its identity sat empty, its neon tower still visible from blocks away but no longer advertising anything.

What saved the Tower Theatre was the same impulse that built it: civic ambition dressed up as entertainment. A Certified Historic Rehabilitation project renovated the theater and its retail wings, and the building reopened as the Tower Theatre for the Performing Arts. The renovation earned awards from both the California Preservation Foundation and the San Joaquin Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 24, 1992. Since 2002, the nonprofit Fresno Filmworks has screened first-run independent cinema at the Tower on the second Friday of every month, and the building hosts the annual Fresno Film Festival. The Tower District itself has grown into Fresno's most walkable, culturally diverse neighborhood -- a stretch of cafes, bookstores, vintage shops, and restaurants that owes its name and much of its character to the 80-foot spire that Lee borrowed from the World of Tomorrow.