 There's history here! And here. There's history there! History is everywhere! So, what we're going to talk about today a little bit is entertainment in Southern Oregon, and then focus specifically on the Holly Theater, a little bit about theater architecture, and why the Holly looks the way it does. Entertainment, obviously in the 19th century, was not what it is today. People entertained themselves. After the trains arrived in Southern Oregon, in particular, larger venues were built, and traveling musicians and acts and vaudeville and comedians and speakers came. And most of our communities, including Ashland, had an opera house. They would occasionally actually put on opera, but mostly you just called the theater the opera house. Our opera house in Ashland was the Ganyard, which is the building in the middle there is where the Wells Fargo Bank is, and it's on the corner. We later got, after the turn of the century, the Vining Theater, which I think of as sitting where the Western Bank was. I can't remember what bank it is today, but it's Caddy Corner from the Ashland Springs Hotel. The interior of the Vining was designed in a different way, still for opera. I thought it was fascinating when I was researching this that for the first show at the Vining Theater, the tickets were $4 apiece, which was a ton of money in 1914. They had a high-class show at the Vining in 1914 when it was built or opened. The Ganyard burnt in 1912. The first floor of it was saved and is still standing. I think it's a used clothing store now. If you've ever wondered why that used clothing store has such an elaborate entryway with the sandstone corner, it's because it was a four-story opera house. Medford had an opera house as well. It went by a lot of different names and no longer stands. In that era, local musicians, including the Medford Coronet Band, would frequently perform at the local opera house. I don't know that we would consider it sort of an amateur hour. I think that there were quite quality entertainment. There were actually traveling shows of actors and performers that moved to Medford because it was conveniently located on the rail line and would occasionally put on shows. There was quite a history of local entertainment when KMED, the radio station that opened at the top of the Sparta building in Medford, first went on the air in the 20s. Most of their musicians were locals. There was a music school, many music schools in fact, on the top of that building and the quality students would leave class and go over to the studios and provide background music for whatever show was going on. I've interviewed some of them over the years. The first real movie theater that was built for that purpose in Southern Oregon was the Bijou, which opened in Medford. If you know Medford, the building closest to me in this photo is the long-time home of Joseph Wynand's furniture, the weeks in which we're building. Most of these buildings were converted storefronts. There was an existing building. Somebody decided to show a movie in it. It wouldn't have a rake. It wouldn't even usually have permanent seating. It was just a long, narrow gallery that they could put a screen at the end and show movies. The ISIS was a pretty typical example of that. They began to decide that they needed more of a sidewalk presence. The beginnings of the show starting on the sidewalk, if you will, to identify it as a theater and entice people to come in. The first building specifically built to show movies in Southern Oregon as opposed to being a converted storefront was the Page Theater. Dr. Page was a local investor and a well-to-do sort of guy, community-minded guy. This building, if you know Medford, sat where there is now a sunken parking lot just on the main street side of Bear Creek. If you look closely at the extreme left of that photo underneath the page sign, you can see the Bear Creek Bridge going over Bear Creek on Main Street. The page burnt in 1923 and was not rebuilt in its original form. Medford, of course, in 1923 was by far one of the biggest cities in Southern Oregon. Robert Rule, who had opinions about things, said we need a theater and editorialized that we did. He had great faith in the people of Southern Oregon. In the year later, Robert Rule got his wish and the criterion opened in October of 1924. I always ask people, the criterion is an interesting name. If you do Google searches like we all do today, there are very few things named criterion. The criterion was actually created by somebody who won a contest, a $25 bond. They just made it up, sort of Crater Lake. Medford, in that era, fancied itself as the gateway to Crater Lake. Craterian and Crater Lake seemed like a good idea. About 650 people when it opened, 700 people. It was by far much larger. Unusually compared to the previous theaters and opera houses and even still today, you go into the side. The theater, the auditorium, is parallel to Central. So you don't enter at the end of the auditorium. You go into the building on the side and then enter. And that was, as architects, this was designed by Frank Clark. Architects were playing with how to design movie theaters. It was a new type of structure and there were really not a lot of rules. And so some of the ideas worked, some didn't. There are a number of side entrance theaters of the 1920 period in Oregon. The best one that I can think of right now is the McDonald and Eugene, which is also still in use. The, the Vining Theater became the Lithia Theater. I don't remember exactly when. It's, and they, their show to the sidewalk. I don't know if you remember the original photo of the Vining, but it had a very small, tasteful sign. When I do theater restoration, I usually tell my theater clients, you can't use the word to garish and theater in the same sentence because there is no such thing as to garish. That's the whole point. Not only did the Lithia Theater have a giant pylon sign, but it also had what becomes the sort of first iteration of a movie marquee, where they can change and advertise what's going to show in a very easy way. And that technology all sort of grew up with theaters. This is the Lithia Theater after World War II. I think what's interesting about this is that for whatever reason they decided the, in this, in this they have a black pylon and a black marquee with black lettering. For whatever reason they painted it here. Pay attention to the L and the way that the marquee is designed because it will come back later in the show. Oops. This is what happens when I skip around. I didn't make up the term. The show starts on the sidewalk. That's a title of a book about a particular architect in California named Charles Lee, who was really amongst the first spokes to realize that there were absolutely no limitations on what you did when you were designing a movie theater. It was just sort of a big fantasy in as long as you provided seats, decent acoustics and presumably enough restrooms in a candy store. You could do anything you wanted and people started to do anything they wanted. In 1924, Neon was introduced into the United States. The first sign in the United States, if you are ever on Jeopardy, was in 1924 a Los Angeles sign that was imported from France and all it said was Packard to advertise a car dealership. What year was that rendering then? The rendering of that for the book. Lee was mostly active in the mid 30s, mid to late 30s. But Neon is such a perfect model, such a perfect tool for the excitement of Hollywood, the excitement of movie theaters that they're almost mean the same thing. We think of Neon and we think of big signs and we think of Hollywood all at the same time. And so the Fox and the Paramount in Portland, Portland Broadway Street in Portland is one of the only streets, only locations in the state of Oregon where most cities regulate sign codes. You all know Ashley has a very stringent sign code and limits the size of signs by code. You can't have signs that are bigger than this, it's prohibited. Broadway as the theater district is the only part of Oregon where you can't have signs that are smaller than this. You have to build big signs in Broadway and so they do. And they always have. The other signs, the Nile and the Aladdin and then the Egyptian. The Egyptian is something to remember because it's interiors. How many of you ever been to the Egyptian in Cusbe? Good for you. When you walk into the Egyptian there are 12 foot or 10 foot tall plaster pharaohs on either side of the lobby. It's absolutely incredible, definitely worth seeing. It was designed and opened in 1924-5. And it was designed by a man, the interiors, by a man named Charles Burke. Remember that name. So in Medford, in Ashland, in Southern Oregon, neon in the mid-30s becomes the way you build a movie theater. And we're going to go through these really quickly until we get to the Holly and go back in time. The Rogue Theater designed by Frank Clark and Robert Keeney, really by Robert Keeney. Beautiful neon signs still in business, still in operation. They take great care of the neon. They also designed our own varsity here in Ashland, Clark and Keeney, really Keeney. And this sign for those of you that have lived in town was restored and Ashland changed its code to allow historic signage and historic neon, which is otherwise prohibited in the community. And so these theaters really were the newer iteration, the evolution of converting a storefront or something akin to an opera house like the Page Theater. Now theaters had their own architectural design, their own style, and were clearly recognized for their function. That continues. The little theater that was the ISIS, it goes through a number of iterations, but basically its location ends up being the Rialto. I've never seen a color photo of this. I'm sure it was pretty spectacular. It's gone as well. And since one of the nicest things about working on movie theaters is that they always put the title of the show on the marquee and put the glory of the internet, you can always tell exactly when that show was released. So you can always date the photo, which is always kind of a challenge when you're dealing with old historic black and white photos. There were other theaters in Medford in particular that kind of went through this same iteration. The Roxy Theater ends up roughly in the location where the page had burnt. It has a sign and marquee that I think you will agree looks very similar to the Lithius Theater in Ashland. After the war in 1940, this sign was old fashioned, so was the marquee, and they remodeled the Roxy into the Esquire. The Esquire I think has a rather pedestrian late 40s, early 50s exterior. I kind of like the portal windows in the doors, but I love the interior. The interior just must have been absolutely to die for. So the Esquire was a remodel of the Roxy. Oh, yes, yes. You know, I don't know the answer to that Maureen. Looking at it, I would think this was probably a little earlier than the 40s, than 47. And again, thinking about what's coming with The Holly, a lot of this, the show started on the sidewalk, particularly in our community, which has never been an incredibly wealthy community. A lot of this was creating an impression on the cheap. You can do amazing things with plaster and paint and mirrors and simple materials. Whereas if you went to Los Angeles or San Francisco or even to Portland, they would have stainless steel and copper and gold leaf. We didn't do a lot of that. We would paint things to give you that impression, and that is part of our history. At any rate, I wish I could have seen that. It looks pretty amazing. The criterion is still pretty much, it was the queen, if you will, like most of the single-screen theaters, the criterion falls on hard times by the late 70s, early 80s, and it closes in 87, becomes, like many of these theaters, a focus of a renovation effort or reconstruction effort and was rebuilt as the criterion center for the performing arts. And that brings us to The Holly. I actually, I put this slide up when I was in Medford, did the show in Medford, and I should have changed the little thing at the bottom. As things have come back to The Holly during this renovation, the face, the frame face is actually sitting on the floor of the auditorium. If you happen to have taken the last tour last Saturday, I don't think the HT has been found. And the HT sat underneath one of the niches on either side of the proscenium and was the original logo of the theater. The Holly was built and opened. Construction was announced in late 1929. It was formally announced what the construction on the corner of Holly and 6 was going to be in November of 1929. And it was going to be Medford's largest movie theater. Auspicious timing, don't you think? The Holly was really the product of four men who had a dream, maybe not all of their sanity. And those four, I'll go into a little detail. The first was the guy who paid for it all, which was Louis Niedermeyer. And Niedermeyer was a orchardist, a wealthy individual. He had property out by Jacksonville. I think he had somehow ended up owning this lot. And it was seen as the location for a movie theater. Frank Clark, you've heard his name before. This is in 1930. Keeney's still in school at the U of O. So this is actually a true Clark design. He designed the exterior shell of the Holly and what most people call a Spanish colonial revival style. Yeah, all right. You know, whatever. People like terms like that. Charles F. Berg and the National Theater Supply Company, same individual that I mentioned was responsible for the Egyptian Theater in Cruz Bay, did all the interiors. And Berg was nothing but accomplished. The Holly was like his 100th theater design. The National Theater Supply Company was a national company. They had an office in Seattle where Berg was located. And architects like Clark, owners like Niedermeyer, wanted to build a theater but really didn't know a whole lot about it. They didn't have a lot of experience. And so they would contract with the National Theater Supply Company who would sell them the screens and the projectors and the film rewinding equipment and all the seats. And as part of that service, they would help you design your theater. And I always am amused. Berg has probably designed 100 or more theaters within the span of a decade. And if you think about the movie theaters from this community or any community you've lived in, there's always things like the Hawaiian, the Egyptian, the Greek, the whatever. And they must have just been bored out of their minds. And had to, let's do it. There are a couple in New Mexico that are like in the Hopi. They're all Cachina dolls and stuff like that. I mean, they just must have thought, well we could do it in Spanish colonial revival, whatever. And so they would make something up. The guy who probably deserves more credit for the Holly being here than anybody is one of the most amusing or interesting guys in Southern Oregon history. And his name is Earl Fail. And if you've never heard of Earl Fail, Earl Fail, he was not only the contractor for the Holly and sort of the idea guy that we needed to build a theater and he had weird political reasons for wanting to do that that we won't go into, but know that he had weird political reasons for most everything in his life. He was a newspaper publisher. He was a contractor. He ends up being county judge, which was the equivalent of the chair of the board of commissioners. If you've ever seen the Medford Mail Tribune a Pulitzer Prize winning paper, part of the reason they won the Pulitzer Prize was for reporting on a period in our history called the Good Government Congress, which was sort of an uprising in 1932-33, that culminates with the judge of the Jackson County Court sitting in the brand new courthouse on Oakdale in Medford and the Oregon State police coming in and whispering in his ear, you can either come with us peacefully or we'll put you in handcuffs and drag you out. And we won't go into that whole story. Maybe someday there'll be a windows in time about that, but Earl Fail was taken from Southern Oregon three or four years after the Holly was completed and by court order was never allowed to return. But nevertheless, he was arrested, a lawyer for rubber rousing, he was arrested for sedition. And sedition is basically trying to overthrow the government in an illegal way. Anyway, the Holly opens in August of 1930 to great fanfare, 1200 seats, almost twice as big as any other theater ever built in Southern Oregon with its beautiful Spanish colonial revival exterior. And it's very similar to the other theaters that we have seen in Southern Oregon alone, Marquis. It was different in that it had a 33-foot-tall neon pylon, which was the largest pylon, not largest neon sign between San Francisco and Portland. It was huge. It was a very expensive project. It was still the Depression. They had the Holly Follies to open it up. Local dignitaries put on skits. There were local performances, and they showed a movie whose name I don't recall right now. Hold everything right there. There it is. There was a whole insert in the Medford Mail Tribune about Medford finally has this new huge theater. Aren't we pleased? All of the developers, all of the contractors, and most of the other movie theaters in town were tickled to death to have the Holly open. The interiors, probably by Berg, were lush. I've actually described this as early whorehouse a couple of times. Most theaters in this period did not have a concession stand. They hadn't quite figured out that you could make... Well, first of all, Hollywood hadn't figured out that they could get most of the ticket prices and let the theater providers spend for themselves, and the movie theaters hadn't figured out that they could really make most of their money at the concession stand by selling us all popcorn for $7. That would come later. So this is the lobby of the Holly, the main lobby where the concession stand would end up was a smoking room, and that's another thing, of course, that we don't think about being in theaters anymore, was everybody smoked almost all the time. Like I say, a big theater, unusually it was a single rake. It has no mezzanine. And what that meant is that even in the nosebleed section, you still got a great view of the screen. The Holly was so big that as all of the problems that started accruing to single-screen theaters in the 60s and 70s happen, they hit the Holly even worse. When I was in Medford... Sorry, I didn't turn my phone off. When I was in Medford, I mentioned that there's an old joke, which I'll tell because we're in the Ashland Public Library that was full credit to Barbara Ryberg, who was the first president of the Friends of the Ashland Public Library, and Barbara had a great sense of humor, probably still does, I don't know. There were three major population groups in Ashland. There were former Washingtonians, former Californians, and former owners of the Mercantini Hotel. You could make the same comment in Medford about former owners or at least operators of the Holly. It went through a number of changes and not exactly a single trajectory to economic success. They tried to remodel it to make it more modern appearing. They ditched the old neon pylon and the old neon marquee to try to update it. They added these really kind of hideous brass-plated hoods over the entryway and over all the windows. There's a picture of it later. It didn't work, and it was closed for theater use. The storefront stayed open. It went through a series of changes again, and finally the last theater operator said, okay, I'm done, and put it up for sale. I usually refer to it in this period with those metal hoods as its Darth Vader period, for some reason it reminds me of Darth Vader's helmet. And the building sold to a bunch of people who had crazy ideas. I think the first time it sold was close to 1987. I think it sold in 1989 or 90. The first guy that bought it was a developer from Eagle Point, nothing against Eagle Point, maybe some against the developer. He had the idea of gutting it, creating an atrium, cutting windows in the side walls, and it would be an inward-focused office complex. He would build floors in the auditorium, and everybody would look down on, I don't know what. And in order to do that, he didn't need any of the seats, which he sold, and he didn't need most of the decorative detail, which he tried to sell, and people would go to sales at the Holley, and they would literally jackhammer detail off the building so that he could build this atrium. He went bankrupt, too bad. Another guy bought it with the intent of trying to restore it into a theater again, and well-intended, was going to relocate his family here, and literally was killed in a car crash on his way here to start that project, so that didn't happen. It ends up being sold to another individual who had the dream of making it strangely enough in sort of a full circle. The home of the Rogue Valley Opera was not very well capitalized. And the roof failed, and one thing that happens when roof fails is that water gets in, and on wooden buildings, wet wood is a lot heavier than dry wood, and the trusses started to fail, and one of them cracked. And the owner got the money together and put in a roof on, but the city nevertheless condemned the auditorium. Pardon me? 2002. The solution to that was to get more cribbing than most of you have probably ever seen, and building two gigantic stacks of structural cribbing to support the truss on a big steel I-beam. They had to cut a hole in the side of the building, basically, to get these giant I-beams that were about that tall and maybe 60 feet long, and they would be supported by this cribbing, taking all the load of the roof, stabilized it, it wasn't going anywhere, and it just sat that way. And he tried to get funding to complete his project. That didn't work, and he ultimately decided that it needed a better owner, another home, and so he put it on the market. Jefferson Public Radio expressed interest in the building, and ultimately would buy it, of course. That made a lot more sense than it might seem at first. JPR had previously purchased the Cascade Theater in Reading, which had followed a sort of similar trajectory as The Holly. It had been vacant. It was built in 1936. It was about the exact same size as The Holly. More of a deco, a little bit more elaborate of a building, but it had closed and been chopped up into a three-plex, if I remember correctly, and was pretty sad and pathetic. JPR moved its studios into it, and when they bought this building, they would laugh that they bought a building for their radio studios, and it came with a theater. And challenged Reading in Northern California and the state, essentially, to work with them to raise the money to renovate it. And they raised about $6 million, and I'm sure most of you, I hope most of you have been to the Cascade. It's won all sorts of awards. It's been operating now for quite some time in the black. It's a phenomenal facility, and has turned around downtown Reading. So the idea was that JPR, having been there, done that, could been there, do that in Medford with The Holly. And so, with great fanfare, The Holly project was announced, front page of the Mail Tribune. Good things are going to happen in downtown Medford. At the time I was working as the designer for the Medford Urban Renewal Agency, and one of their primary goals was to increase downtown activity and nightlife by building things or supporting things exactly like The Holly that would support restaurants and after-hours businesses and all of the things that we enjoy in Ashland that Medford doesn't, because most everybody there tends to close up at five o'clock and go home or come to Ashleigh for dinner. But not everybody was thrilled by this concept. And so that was kind of a little bit of a shock. I've never been involved in a project where someone announced a multimillion-dollar renovation and the city went, nah, we're not so interested. But the city was. The city got it. And the Urban Renewal Agency and the city of Medford put funding into renovating The Holly. As I said, it was one of their projects. And the first thing that we do in any renovation, well, let me step up. What we decided to do with The Holly, is what we had done with the cascade and what I usually do with theater projects that I work on around the state. I worked on the Egyptian, too, among others. We do the outside first. And you do the outside first because most of these buildings have sort of gone fallow. They're a little pathetic to drive by. They have boarded up windows and lack of maintenance. And although everybody is usually really supportive of the concept, wouldn't it be cool to do that? Most people are like, but they're absolutely crazy to try. And so you restore the exterior with the goal of sort of establishing your bona fides and getting people excited that, wow, this is going to be so cool. Can I help? And so the way you do a theater restoration or any restoration is that the building tells you what it was. And you start looking at a very fine grain about the information that's still there. And any building that has survived over time has all of its pieces, its evidence, usually is there. And so we do paint analysis. We figure out what the original paint colors were, what it really looked like. We look for little hidden details or details that you might not notice when you drive by that survive. And we use them for design details for things that we need to create to change the use. And the first thing you do, partially to gather that information, is to remove all of the stupid that people have put on over the years. And there was plenty of stupid at the Holly. One of the things that we did for the Holly when it was purchased, its recessed entryway, its exterior foyer had glue down carpet on it. It was really terrible. JPR actually bought new carpet, just because the old carpet was so disgusting and just put new carpet up. And then below that there was a thin set mortar, a little concrete layer. There were no historic photos of what the exterior foyer looked like that would give us any detail. And so we didn't know. And I designed, I'm obviously a little sorry that we didn't get to build it, this really cool terrazzo entryway that was going to go in there. And so they were starting to do the demolition. They pulled up the thin set and the contractor calls me and says you've got to come down here. And so this is the original tile. This tile, incidentally, designed by Charles F. Berg at the Egyptian Theater if you go behind the concession stand at the Egyptian, when we pulled up the carpet there, same tile, but in terracotta and cream rather than green and cream. So Berg for his 100 theaters would occasionally duplicate things. Big exterior restoration. We rented most of the scaffolding in Southern Oregon for a couple of months. All the windows get restored and we start taking on the exterior. Got to recreate the signs. It's a big statement for any theater. And so we sent out RFPs to qualified sign companies to replicate the pylon using the information that we could get from the available photographs that we had. I would get these weird calls like the signs in a field in Jacksonville, you got to go find it. We never did. If you know where it is, we're still interested. Same thing for the marquee. Same process. Hired a company that had expertise in movie theater design. They replicated it. I don't think this will work. This is actually a little video that shows you the sequencers of them making that sign. People started doing all the other pieces, restoring all of the original wood windows, putting the windows in, faux-painting the pattern of the stucco, building your sidewall to the pop-up spot. Hello. I'm losing things. Sorry. I don't know if I can recreate that or not. Anyway, I told you we know how to do tile. We do. We had, when we found that original tile, we, we might be out a lot more. When we found that original tile, we just had it recreated because building for this building was a technological failure. The pylon showed up on two flatbed trucks. We had trains all over the street, which is always a fun part of a project. My absolutely favorite photo of this restoration is this one, which was taken from the roof of the Federal Courthouse building just across the street from the holly. I knew it was the perfect vantage point and I was foolish enough to go ask the homeland security guards if I could go up on the roof and take a picture. They absolutely not. They said, what do you want to take a picture of? I said, there's a sign going up. He said, hold on, the guy went up. This is his photo. I don't know his name. He took it with his cell phone and emailed him. He marked he up, putting the interior poster cases all created in the spirit of Spanish colonial revival. Re-revival. Re-revival, there you go. It's right there. I know, but I can't. All right, I'll just hold it. How's that? Getting everything ready. And in April of 2012, we had the grand re-lighting. In theater renovation, the grand re-lighting is sort of the culmination of phase one. You've now restored the exterior. You have a huge event. Thousand people show up. Everybody's kind of convinced, wow, this is really going to happen. I usually stand way in the back of the crowd. I've been to four of these things. I usually stand way in the back of the crowd and I say, you can just see people reaching for their wallets. We did a nice job. The city recognized that we did a nice job. But then we entered into what Jefferson Public Radio itself once called a period of organizational chaos. And most of you are local. Most of you know my last name. Most of you know this story. So I won't go into a lot of detail other than to say that Mary Cullinan is no longer on my Christmas list. Back two years, 18 months, new executive director has to be hired. You have to rebuild all of the You have to rebuild all of the doubts about the renovation, the efficacy of the renovation in the community and build that back up. Money starts coming back in. We turn the corner. We decide that we'll bring the show on the sidewalk inside just a little to show people again what we can do and what this will look like. This is the interior lobby. This was actually done as a demonstration project by a previous owner. I won't say anything. One of the problems of doing most renovations is especially on interiors that tend to change a lot more is that all the photos are black and white. And so you don't have much information other than the patterns. So we, in the demolition of this set of doors, this original paint detail was underneath a 2x4 nailer to hold the doors up. And so we had not only the original pattern but all the original paint colors as well. We created templates so that we could recreate that pattern not only in those areas but anywhere else that they were appropriate for the theater. And that's what it looks like if you were lucky enough to get on a last tour last week. And so on the circuitous journey of the Holly, we will break ground for the rest of the major renovation of all the interior work sometime next month. It'll take 12 to 18 months, if we hope, and we'll complete the project that was started in a way by Earl Fennel in 1930. Thank you very much. I'm happy to answer your question.