The Fox Theater's Tower: Bakersfield's Marquee Still Marks the Night

The Fox Theater announces itself the way great old theaters do: with a tower you can see for blocks and a marquee that turns an ordinary evening into an occasion. Opened on Christmas Day in 1930, the Spanish Colonial-style theater on H Street has survived the full arc of American moviegoing, from single-screen palace to decline to restoration, and it remains the defining landmark of downtown Bakersfield.

The building's survival was not guaranteed. Like many downtown theaters, the Fox passed through years when its future was in doubt, and its return as a performing arts venue, hosting concerts, comedy, films and community events, is one of Bakersfield's clearest preservation successes. The tower and marquee are not decoration on the city's history; they are the city's history, maintained in working order and lit on show nights for audiences arriving from across Kern County.

A night at the Fox has its own geography. Audiences park and dine downtown, walk past the older commercial blocks of the city center, and file into a room whose interior, restored period detail and all, recalls an era when the theater was the largest public room in most Americans' lives. For performers, rooms like the Fox are prized on tour schedules precisely because they are unlike arenas: intimate, resonant and unmistakably of their city.

The theater also works as an anchor. Downtown Bakersfield's event economy leans on the pairing of the Fox and the arena and convention facilities nearby, and a busy Fox night lifts the surrounding restaurants and streets with it. Preservation, in this case, is not nostalgia; it is infrastructure that happens to be beautiful.

Nearly a century after it opened, the Fox still does its original job, gathering Bakersfield into one room in the dark to watch something together. In November, with the show calendar full and the evenings cool, the marquee on H Street is burning bright right on schedule.