One of the largest theaters on the West Coast with more than 3,400 seats, the Fox was designed by San Francisco architectural firm Weeks & Day, known for its theaters, schools and Carnegie libraries throughout California. The project was constructed by Oaklandbuilder Maury Diggs, who is credited with designing the building’s office wings.

Even in the heyday of elaborate movie palaces, the Fox stood out. The architecture of the buff brick and terra cotta structure has long defied definition, being variously described as Indian, Moorish, Medieval and Baghdadian. At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle called it “different, novel and mystic,” noting “its spaciousness, luxurious appointments and beautiful designs.” Rich colors and gold leaf were abundant, including two bejeweled golden figures flanking the stage who were quickly dubbed Buddhas, though historians now believe they were designed as warriors.

One writer summed up the gilded glitz as “one part Arab and three parts Hollywood hokum.”

“It’s an amazing building,” said Patricia Dedekian, president of the non-profit Friends of the Oakland Fox, which has fought to restore the building. “It’s really astounding. What strikes me is that the level of detail (on ceilings and other out of the way places) was done that way knowing no one would ever see it up close.”

It was initially believed the theater would be named the Bagdad (sic) but it opened as the West Coast Oakland. The name was changed to the Fox Oakland within a year when the West Coast and Fox Theater chains merged.

On opening day, West Coast Theaters took the unprecedented step of buying the entire Key System line for an hour, allowing patrons to ride inbound trains for free, and likely resulting in the turnout of 20,000. Those who came were treated to a continuously running bill including a 20-piece orchestra, the Mighty Wurlitzer, two newsreels and a Fanchon and Marco live stage show of dancing girls, stilt walkers and a unicyclist. Patrons also saw – and heard – the feature film, “The Air Circus” in Oakland’s first theater designed for sound projection.

In its first three years, the Fox hosted more than 6 million customers. That same year, the nearby Paramount Theater opened, only to close six months later for nearly a year because of operating costs.

“Most older people were in (the Fox) at some critical moment of adolescence, with their boyfriends smooching in the balcony,” said Naomi Schiff, former president of the Oakland Heritage Alliance, a preservation group.

A long decline

Business at the Fox remained strong throughout the war years and into the 1950s, but attendance had dropped by the early ’60s. In 1962, the theater stopped showing first-run films, experimented with soft porn, and closed “temporarily” in 1966. For the next seven years, it opened only sporadically for films and events, though businesses continued to occupy the wings.

The Fox survived an arson fire in 1973, but its increasingly shabby condition led it to be derided as “the largest outdoor urinal in the world.” Still, the theater escaped an attempt to raze it for a parking lot in 1975 and was named a city landmark in 1978.

That same year, Piedmont residents Erma and Mario DeLucchi bought the property at auction for $340,000 in hopes of restoring it and saving it from the fate of San Francisco’s Fox Theater, which had been demolished in 1963. The couple had gone on Saturday night dates at the Oakland Fox as high school sweethearts in the early 1930s, Erma wearing the gardenia corsages Mario would bring her.

“We just loved it. It was luxurious and it was always a good movie,” recalled Erma DeLucchi, an Oakland native. But Mario died soon after they bought the theater, and the project never got under way.

The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The last public use of the theater was during the 1983 and 1984 Christmas seasons, when the Victorian Dickens Fair was staged there. The Fox last was used in the late 1980s when parts of the 1992 Robert Redford-Sydney Poitier movie “Sneakers” were filmed there.

There were some grandiose plans over the years, including one in the mid-80s to incorporate the Fox into a downtown shopping mall. But “none of those proposals reached a critical mass,” said city project manager Jeff Chew, who began working on the Fox 20 years ago for Oakland’s Community and Economic Development Agency. “Nothing happened and the Fox lay dormant all those years.”

“Uptown has suffered from blockbuster concepts and no execution on the ground level, the idea of being a little bit more modest but effective,” said Schiff, whose design firm is in the neighborhood.

The city steps in

In 1996, the city, under the leadership of Mayor Elihu Harris, bought the building from Erma DeLucchi for $3 million. But still, nothing happened. After the wet El Niño winter of 1997-98, preservationists began pressuring the city to repair the Fox’s roofs. Parts of the intricately painted walls and ceilings had been damaged by rain, and mushrooms were sprouting from the carpet.

“Those two actions saved the building from being destroyed completely,” Schiff said.

In 1999, the city spent $1 million to repair the roofs. The same year, Friends of the Oakland Fox, an offshoot of the Oakland Heritage Alliance, was formed. The group convinced the city to spend another $650,000 to repair and relight the theater’s marquee and red blade sign to generate interest in the property.

“It got rid of the peeling paint ‘Oakland’ sign that every TV camera focused on when they talked about crumbling Oakland,” Schiff said. “It began to make people feel like there was a possibility.”

City officials already had hired architectural consultants Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, who had worked on projects includingNew York’s Radio City Music Hall, to prepare a master plan for reusing the Fox. Chew shopped their 2001 report around to try to drum up interest from developers and ended up with two proposals. Neither was deemed feasible.

Enter Tagami.

The Oakland native, whose parents had their first date at the Fox Theater, had first approached city officials about restoring the theater soon after the city purchased it in 1996.

“I felt laughed at,” recalled Tagami, 42, a high school dropout who cut his teeth working as a laborer in the construction business before starting to buy and fix up old buildings, mostly in downtown Oakland.

But Tagami earned a good measure of credibility for restoring the former Kahn’s department store across from City Hall – a long-shuttered but stunning piece of Beaux Arts architecture with its soaring glass dome – into the Rotunda office and retail building. Soon after the Rotunda opened, and the Fox sign was relit, an editorial in the Oakland Tribune urged someone to tackle the Fox. It suggested Tagami. Impatient with the glacial progress on the Fox to date, Tagami organized a meeting of interested parties and then took another plan to the city.

“It blows my mind that everyone is so satisfied with not doing anything. At some point, it’s time to stop talking and put your nose to the grindstone,” Tagami said.

“He was able to gather enthusiasm and make people believe it could actually happen,” said Dedekian, of Friends of the Oakland Fox. “He’s like an incredible force of nature. If he starts in on something, he manages to power through.”

That steamrolling style has not endeared Tagami to everyone.

But “I totally appreciate he is the way someone absolutely would have to be to accomplish this project,” Dedekian said. “There have been so many obstacles along the way. Anyone who didn’t have his stamina, determination and will would have given up a long time ago.”

Tagami’s original plan, approved by the City Council, was for a bare-bones, $24 million “Ruins” project that would have reopened the theater as a 600-seat cabaret venue without fully restoring it. It also included the creation a new home for the Oakland School for the Arts, an arts charter middle and high school launched by former Mayor Jerry Brown, who still heads its board.

“What I quickly realized was that the community expectation was much higher. Everyone would be disappointed unless we did it all,” Tagami said.

A complex deal

Tagami began searching for additional funding, leading to a complex financing and ownership structure that combines city redevelopment money with grants, tax credits and even billboard revenue.

A novel strategy merges federal historic tax credits, which are the largest source of federal funding for historic preservation projects, with new market tax credits, which can be received for projects in low-income areas. Together, the two programs are contributing $19 million in tax credits, attracting three major equity investors, who will receive a fraction of each dollar spent back from the government.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is investing $10.5 million, Bank of America nearly $6.5 million and the Charter School Development Corporation, $2.1 million.

“The Fox Theater is a phenomenal example of what we do in community development,” said Claudia Robinson, senior vice president of community development banking for Bank of America. “We have done a huge number of theaters. They are amazing assets for the country. They represent some of the best architecture we have.”

Bank of America, which was instrumental in securing the tax credits and bringing in investment partners for the Fox, has invested in many noteworthy historic projects locally, including San Francisco’s Ferry Building, the Rotunda building in Oakland, and Ford Point, the former Ford assembly plant in Richmond.

In addition to helping preserve a historic asset, Robinson said Bank of America was motivated by the opportunity to help stimulate economic development in Oakland. She said restoration of the Fox will generate 600 permanent jobs in a one-to-two-block radius of the theater.

The City of Oakland has loaned $25.5 million to the project and the state is contributing more than $3.25 million in historic preservation grants. Another $6.5 million comes from a much-examined billboard deal in which CBS Outdoor, which was Viacom at the time, was allowed to build an electronic billboard at the eastern end of the Bay Bridge. From the proceeds, the billboard company is giving $6.5 million to the Oakland School of the Arts, which will use it to prepay its first seven years’ rent at the Fox. Additional money comes from other sources including fund raising and grants, and an insurance settlement for a 2004 fire is pending, adding up to $58 million.

The city’s prior investment of $11 million brings the total to nearly $70 million. But that’s still not enough to fully restore the Fox, said Tagami, who continues to beat the bushes for additional funding. He said another $6 million has been secured, and more is on the way. A capital campaign will continue even after the theater opens.

“Cultural arts are a choice. It’s not an obligation,” Tagami said. “We not only have to educate government but also ask business interests and individual citizens to participate.”

“It is very difficult for the public sector to revitalize our assets sometimes,” said City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente. “Having a third party involved, a developer with expertise in putting these complex financial structures together, is a plus for the city.”

The tax credits necessitate a complicated ownership structure in which the city has transferred the building to the newly created non-profit Fox Oakland Theater, Inc., whose board of directors are city employees appointed by the City Manager. Ownership of the Fox will revert back to the city after seven years.

Years in the making, the project has gone through 28 public hearings, plus another three dozen meetings on community outreach and local hiring for construction.

“Phil is performing a miracle to get the Fox open and should get a Medal of Honor,” former mayor Brown, now state attorney general, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s been an extraordinarily challenging and complex problem … and to get it open and get all that money is amazing.”

Tagami, who is charging a below-market-rate 2 percent developer fee for the project, will be paid just over $1 million. But that amount won’t even cover his costs, industry sources say. Tagami sees it more as a gift back to his city, where he grew up the youngest of three siblings and is now raising his two preschool-age children with his wife, Jessica.

“I get contacted by people I knew in elementary school,” Tagami said, thanking him for his work on the Fox. “That’s a great reward, better than money. It outlives money.” Plus, he admitted, “it enhances my reputation for getting things done.”

“I don’t know many people who would have done basically a pro bono job like Phil,” said Mike Ghielmetti, president of Signature Properties, which will open 132 condominiums and three restaurants this winter at Broadway and Grand Avenue, not far from the Fox. Another 400 condominiums are slated to break ground next year.

“That building would still be a blight without Phil,” said Ghielmetti, who said he charges a 5 percent fee for large development projects with much higher revenues.

Developer John Protopappas, who has restored historic Oakland landmarks including the Tribune Tower and the former Sears department store, called the Fox restoration “a really great project and something the entire city can be very proud of.”

“It’s a historic building that is one of the more beautiful buildings in the city,” said Protopappas, president and Chief Executive Officer of Madison Park Financial Corp. “It’s an important part of our cultural heritage.”

Special thanks to Friends of the Oakland Fox for its excellent history of the theater at www.foxoakland.org.