San Jose's Century 21 theater: No place like dome

SAN JOSE -- They were the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria of Space Age movie theaters, a domed armada set sail across a landscape in which anything suddenly seemed possible.

At the time of its opening 50 years ago in a fallowed farm field, "looking like a flying saucer about to take off," Century 21 became the first theater in Northern California that challenged the imagination of moviegoers as much as the pictures that played there.

Now it's among the last of its kind standing. After a recent, dramatic showdown at City Hall, the cinematic spaceship that architect Vincent Raney designed for a "city obsessed with the future" looks likely to be saved because of its past. But a broader debate continues over just which parts of the Bay Area's history are truly historic: Raney's domes in Fremont and Oakland are already gone, and his Pleasant Hill theater gave way to the wrecking ball last year after a City Council vote, despite a last-minute campaign by preservationists to save it.

Raney built a dozen domes in the Bay Area, all for movie impresario Ray Syufy. The theater impresario agreed to locate San Jose's Century 21, 22 and 23 -- the original theater's round-roofed companions -- on 11.6 acres owned by the architect's family, which also controlled the adjacent Winchester Mystery House, the peaks and cupolas of its rooftop in stark counterpoint to the nearby dome star fleet.

"As this area grew and changed from agriculture to technology, these domes became an important emblem of that change," said Matthew Sutton, standing forlornly outside the now-closed Century 21, which opened in 1964 and closed on March 31. "They wanted to evoke the future and embrace the optimism of the Space Age, that postwar Camelot era." Sutton organized a Save the Domes Facebook page, which, along with a petition drive that drew more than 8,600 signatures on Change.org, was thought to have influenced the City Council's 7-4 vote on June 10 to grant landmark protection to Century 21.

Last year, a campaign to save the CinArts, Raney's dome in Pleasant Hill, fell one vote short when it went before City Council. During that debate, one woman warned council members that "once it's destroyed, like the Twin Towers, you don't see it anymore." In San Jose, an impassioned dome defender cautioned the council against committing "dome-icide."

Floating objects

For now, Century 21 has been spared that fate, but Century 22 and 23 appear unlikely to survive long enough to justify their names. Century 22 opened in 1966 as a single dome, followed a year later by Century 23. But as multiplexes began to replace single-screen theaters in the 1970s, Century 22 expanded to a Picasso-esque embarrassment of riches with three domes, each one with its own screen.

Unlike buildings that create a wall along the street, these were "object buildings," said architect Sally Zarnowitz, a former member of San Jose's planning department, "that lend themselves to floating in the landscape."

Century 21 was clearly the mother ship, with its unmistakable resemblance to the flying saucer that brought Klaatu and Gort to this planet in the 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Raney gave it a gaudy zigzag parapet that also evoked a merry-go-round, Zarnowitz said. "All of that played into the idea of leisure architecture in the '60s."

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San Jose's Century 21 theater: No place like dome