Much has happened at the corner where Tower Cafe took over a bleak storefront next to the iconic Tower Theatre and created a place where an entire community meets and eats.
With Food, Tower Café Strengthens a Cultural Crossroads on Broadway
The intersection with 16th Street/Land Park Drive is Broadway’s most important. It was made important by the 1938 opening there of the Tower Theatre on the site of a former city dump.1 A movie theater in the 1930s and 1940s was an important place where people gathered to be entertained and informed. The neon-decorated tower became a Sacramento icon, a status aided in later decades by its high visibility from the elevated Capital City Freeway.
When the Tower Theatre opened 71 years ago on November 11, 1938, its location was considered peripheral for a big movie house. According to Charles J. Holtz, member of the group that built the theater, a loan officer at the Bank of America had refused to finance the project because the proposed location was “too far out.” At that time, Sacramento’s big movie houses were downtown on K Street, except for the Alhambra, a 5-cent streetcar ride up K. There were two theaters in Oak Park, but they were small compared to the 1,000-seat Tower.
With the construction loan secured from another bank, the Tower Theatre got built. Its promoters convinced City Hall to change the name from what was then Y Street to Broadway, in allusion to New York City’s Broadway because this area had become a brightly lit corridor of live theaters and movie palaces. Sacramento’s Broadway did not become a specialized entertainment district, but the Tower Theatre was popular enough to survive suburbanization, television, tri-section, videotapes, and digital media. Today, the theater screens independent, foreign, and specialty films.
The Tower Theatre was built with 10 rental spaces for other businesses. These have housed a wide variety of retail and service enterprises, including barber and beauty shops, accountants, real estate offices, insurance offices, manufacturers agents, a photographer, a dancing academy, a women’s clothier. Still tenants are Tower Cigar and Pipe, and Broadway Comics and Cards. Among the building’s past tenants have been two that became especially well-known: Joe Marty’s and Tower Drug Store.
The full name of Joe Marty’s was Joe Marty’s El Chico Bar and Restaurant, which occupied the space at 1500 Broadway from 1954 through 2005, when it experienced a fire that closed the business. A liquor store and restaurant with the “El Chico” name was the first occupant of that space, and later, when Joe Marty moved his business from J Street to the Tower Theatre building, he incorporated it into the name of his establishment.
Joe Marty was one of Sacramento’s biggest local sports heroes, having played baseball 1938-1941 for the Cubs and Phillies, played for and managed the Triple-A Sacramento Solons, and run a popular sports bar from 1938 until 1980. The Broadway location of Joe Marty’s was just a few blocks from the Solons’ old home at Edmonds Field. Bill Conlin, long-time sports editor of The Sacramento Bee, referred to Joe Marty’s as a saloon, a shrine and “a unique sports bar, if not the Sacramento original of the species,” and “the first downtown outlet for pizza.”2 Broaster chicken, an iconic food of the 1950s, was served there and advertised in neon. The place was heavily decorated with local baseball memorabilia and was a favorite of old-time sports fans, even after Marty sold it. Its classy neon sign featured a baseball outlined in white with seams in red and lettering in green.3
Tower Drug Store, owned by Clayton Solomon, was among the first tenants in the Tower Theatre building. Typical of mid-century drug stores, it included a soda fountain. Among items sold in the store were records, and often it was Clayton’s teenaged son, Russ, who handled those sales. Russ Solomon went on to found Tower Records, which invented the large record store as a retail type and became a global music seller with over 200 stores around the world, including outlets in New York City, London, and Tokyo.
The first Tower Records opened on Watt Avenue in 1960, followed by a second Sacramento store in 1965 at 2500 16th Street, right across from the Tower Theatre and Tower Drug Store where Solomon had first sold records for his dad. Within a few years, Tower had opened stores in San Francisco (at Columbus and Bay) and Los Angeles (at 8801 Sunset Boulevard). Tower Records stores became hugely important purveyors of pop music culture, particularly during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
One fan of pop has said about the Sunset Strip Tower Records, “No other store combined, had more in-store autograph signings, more parking lot and indoor concerts, filmed in or at or seen as a backdrop in motion picture and television, was shopped at by more recording artists, and was the site of more midnight album and CD releases.”4
While the Sacramento stores did not achieve that level of celebrity, they were local hearths of hip, centers of counterculture and cool. In addition to offering the latest in pop music, Tower Records sold a wide variety of other musical genres, and within them, had impressive depth. Tower employees were known to be serious and knowledgeable about the music they sold, from blues to opera. “Tower was much more than a mere retail outlet. It was, in fact, a cultural center at a time when many different cultures were bumping up against one another, finding common ground where they thought there was none.”5
By 1976, Solomon had opened Tower Books, Posters, and Plants at 1600 Broadway, next door to Tower Records. A few years later, Posters and Plants moved into 1618 Broadway and became Tower Video by the early 1980s. Together with the movie theater across the street, Solomon had created one of Sacramento’s most important cultural crossroads at Broadway and 16th Street.
Over the decades, the ability to attract people to the movie theater and to bricks-and-mortar media stores lessened. More and more media could be acquired and enjoyed in private. Going out in public—to a cultural crossroads—to consume movies or music or magazines became less and less necessary. Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and its stores (except for those abroad, which had been sold earlier) closed two years later.6 At the Broadway and 16th intersection, Russ Solomon now owns R5 Records and Video, the bookstore is the independent Avid Reader, and the video store is another independent simply called Records.7
Meanwhile, Tower Drugs survived until 1985. Its space then housed Tower Ice Cream and Deli for a few years; in 1990 former filmmaker James Seyman acquired the lease and opened the Tower Café. Its international cuisine, décor from diverse cultures, and attractive outdoor—not-quite-but-almost-sidewalk—seating amidst subtropical greenery have helped it become one of Sacramento’s most popular and well-known eateries. There are many metrics of its success, including the number of requests for its recipes in the pages of The Sacramento Bee, the number of times it appears in news stories incidentally as the locus of a meeting or interview, and its frequent mention as a great place for breakfast or dessert. It has become a major reason to come to the old cultural crossroads at Broadway and 16th.
While the consumption of movies and music has witnessed a trend toward privatization, the same is not true for food. Its consumption has become more public. In the early 1960s, only a little over one-quarter of the average American’s food dollar was spent on food eaten away from home; that share had nearly doubled three decades later. The Tower Café, and in fact all the restaurants in the Broadway series, should be recognized as important magnets, drawing Sacramentans and others out into the public sphere where people mingle and meet and create a climate of shared trust and enjoyment, despite their many differences. The need for places like the Tower Café is especially great in a diverse society like that of Sacramento.
While incidental to the Tower Records/Tower Books/Tower Video story, the earlier uses of 2500 16th Street and 1600 Broadway are worth noting in the context of the historical geography of food along Broadway. 2500 16th Street first appears in a city directory in 1939 as a Safeway Store. The Safeway moved out to a new, larger building with a much larger parking lot at 915 Broadway circa 1957, at which point Glidden Drive In Paint Center moved in, to be replaced by Tower Records in 1965. 1600 Broadway was initially a gas station, but by 1936, the local grocery chain Cardinal was there, along with a butcher and a baker. In the next year, the baker was gone, but a fruiter and a deli had appeared. This model of several independent food purveyors under one roof was not unusual for the time, and appeared elsewhere on Broadway. In 1942, the Broadway and 16th Cardinal moved down Broadway to #1402, the building that now houses China Buffet. A series of other grocery stores occupied 1600 Broadway until Tower Books arrived in 1976.
Notes
1 Most information about the Tower Theatre in this essay is from “50 and Fabulous: How the Tower Became the Longest-Running Cinema in Town” by Don Stanley. The Sacramento Bee magazine section, October 30, 1988.
2 “ Friends Sustain Marty’s Legacy” by Bill Conlin. The Sacramento Bee, June 5, 1994.
5 “The Power of Tower – More than just a record store, the Sacramento chain has long been a beacon of pop culture” by David Barton. The Sacramento Bee, May 16, 2003.
--Robin Datel