After much contemplation, Eos & Nyx, the dazzling new restaurant on Paseo de San Antonio, wins this columnist’s award for “Best Transformation of a Botched UA Theater.”
Right away, a plate of house-made pappardelle, ground duck and grana padano cheese immediately flavored my memories of the failed United Artists cinema complex in the very same building, over 25 years ago. Since I had just returned from Barcelona with Euros still in my pocket, and since Eos & Nyx was a Mediterranean place, I hazily conjured up a quote from The Shadow of the Wind, a famous Barcelona novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón:
“Like all old cities, Barcelona is a sum of its ruins. The great glories so many people are proud of—palaces, factories, and monuments, the emblems with which we identify—are nothing more than relics of an extinguished civilization.”
In this case, the extinguished civilization would be the San Jose Redevelopment Agency (RDA), which spent $4.5 million in public money to produce a much-heralded UA Theater. It opened in 1996. It closed in 1999.
As usual, the RDA didn’t want to work with any local cultural organizations like the Camera Theatres, institutions much loved by the people who already lived downtown. Instead, they wanted to lure a big-name player, hoping the UA Theater would suddenly trigger another 10,000 wealthy white suburbanites to come back and “revitalize” the neighborhood. The word “revitalize” was bandied about every five seconds in those days, much in the same way “vibrancy” is now the buzzword of choice.
Ultimately, the UA Theater was a colossal failure. Even with eight screens and a total of 3,700 seats, the three-story complex was never able to land the big-name films. People just didn’t show up. Toward the end of 1999, it became clear the theater would never succeed, with United Artists claiming it had already lost $10 million in the short four years the theater was open.
In a now famous story, United Artists then secretly emptied out the entire complex in the middle of the night, during January of 2000, long before their lease was even up. They effectively snuck in the building, with 18-wheelers waiting outside, and took all the lobby fixtures, projectors, chairs, food concessions and other equipment. They packed it all up and abandoned the whole business without even telling the landlord or the city.
I witnessed this myself. I was staggering home drunk from Cactus Club and walked right by the theater at 12:30am, or thereabouts, and saw the semitrucks outside. I saw rows and rows of chairs sitting by the doors along Second Street, waiting to be removed. I saw employees loading up the trucks.
And I just started laughing. I distinctly remember laughing at the whole ridiculous failure.
Thankfully, the heroes at Camera Theaters did eventually take over the building, renaming it Camera 12, but even they couldn’t survive. Also thankfully, Cinequest took place in the building for years. Many of us have plenty of memories going up and down the escalators to see Cinequest films during the festival. I would even go as far as to say 2014 or so was the heyday of Cinequest, with that building as the central headquarters and meeting place of the whole festival. The area just bubbled with activity. I miss it.
So, at Eos & Nyx, whose soft opening drew capacity crowds last week, I could not separate the memories from the amazing ground duck pappardelle in front of me. Surrounded by magazine-fashionable Asian couples, families, kids and various friends of the owners, my mind kept harking back to those escalators that I ascended and descended a thousand times at Cinequest.
Don’t get me wrong—everyone was happy to see the building transformed. The restaurant was rocking. The woman at the table next to me had one of those external LED flashes attached to her phone and spent the whole night taking pictures of every single dish and every single cocktail, rearranging the plates on her table for the optimum shot, while her husband just sat there and watched.
In the end, I still had a five-Euro bill in my wallet from Barcelona, so I gave it to the server and then disappeared into the night.
