It was 1998 and LA movie buffs were desperate about a proposal from Pacific Theaters to dismantle the Hollywood Cinerama Dome, a complex of restaurants and a movie multiplex that would become ArcLight Cinemas around it.
The proposed $ 60 million development, critics said, would obscure the image of midcentury icon Welton Becket and Associates’ 1963 design as the world’s first all-concrete geodesic dome. The Cinerama lobby would be replaced by a restaurant, and the stadium seating would make the venue’s legendary epic screen disappear.
Public outrage was fierce. The Los Angeles Conservancy got behind its preservation, and a grassroots organization called Friends of the Cinerama Dome was launched. Jackie Goldberg emerged as a City Council advocate, and by December that December, Pacific Theaters agreed to keep the much-loved theater as it was – and still is.
What Goes Around Gets Around: On Monday, the Pacific and ArcLight theaters announced they would not reopen, and movie buffs took to Twitter to voice their fear that their beloved Cinerama Dome was in imminent danger. Could the structure be vulnerable to demolition? Could some crazy developer turn it into a luxury steakhouse?
The short answers: probably not, and probably not.
In 1998, the Cinerama Dome was designated LA Historic-Cultural Monument No. 659. This protects the building – to an extent, said Linda Dishman, president and chief executive of the LA Conservancy, and Ken Bernstein, the city’s chief urban planner and manager. Bureau for Historical Sources.
“Even if a developer showed up in the wings today and had plans to demolish and redevelop the site, there would be an extensive public process and the public would have many opportunities to think along about preserving and using the site. Cinerama Dome, ”said Bernstein.
Any request for a permit to demolish the Cinerama Dome would pass through town, Bernstein said, and his department would direct the owner to prepare an environmental impact statement. The EIR process, which can take up to a year, aims to investigate what would be damaged by demolition and to explore alternatives to that damage.
Its historic-cultural landmark status also means the LA City Council and Cultural Heritage Committee can defer a demolition permit for up to a year, Dishman said.
After the EIR is completed, the city council decides how big the impact is and can refuse the demolition. The Cultural Heritage Commission ordinance that would be used to navigate this process does not allow the City Council to deny demolition based on the historical significance of the building, nor would it ensure that the Cinerama Dome would must continue to function as a cinema. .
However, the ordinance gives the city the power to review planned changes to the building’s interior and exterior. Changes – in order for the dome to function as a massive restaurant, for example – would have to comply with federal guidelines called the standards of the Secretary of the Interior, which Dishman described as the Ten Commandments of Change.
She said the conversion to a restaurant would be difficult because it is very difficult to vent a geodesic dome. The building is constructed with about 300 pentagonal and hexagonal panels, each weighing a whopping 3,200 pounds and structurally interdependent, so you can’t just pull a few out. This challenge is what destroyed the 1998 plan for a lobby restaurant.
“This feels so much like 1998, because there was a huge outrage when they talked about making changes and taking away the lobby,” Dishman said, adding that fans and architecture buffs should do what people were doing back then. “I think people now really need to beg Pacific Theaters to make sure this building continues to have a future as a cinema.”
Pacific built the dome using a patented Buckminster Fuller technique to bolt the panels together. After the Cinerama Dome opened, other domed theaters were built in places such as Orange, Anaheim, Pleasant Hill, and San Jose.
All other domes have been demolished, except for San Jose’s Century 21 Dome, which was named a city landmark and eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands in the shadow of a shiny new Silicon Valley office complex.