Group Says Code May Be Curtains for Theater : Landmarks: Preservation foundation says it can’t possibly bring North Park Theatre up to modern earthquake standards, as city insists.

The president of a group trying to reopen the North Park Theatre said Friday that the 63-year-old building may be “doomed” because the city refuses to compromise on what he called a rigid building code.

The theater, at 29th Street and University Avenue in North Park, has been closed since 1987. The city, which condemned the property and later took title to it, has given a community group until Oct. 1 to come up with a plan for renovation and reopening.

But the group, the North Park Theatre Foundation, suffered a major setback Wednesday after a structural and engineering inspection found the city and the group’s would-be saviors at odds over building codes.

“The theater is definitely doomed if we don’t get some kind of leniency on the code,” said Martin Gregg, the group’s president.

City officials say the building fails to meet even the 1949 requirements for protecting the theater and anyone inside in the event of a major earthquake. The code specifies that buildings failing to meet 1949 standards must be brought to 100% of 1988 guidelines.

“The city’s interpretation of the code is that, if buildings don’t meet 25% of the earthquake-proof requirements (the 1949 guidelines), then they have to meet 100% of the 1988 guidelines,” said city planner Ron Buckley, who deals with historic structures.

Gregg said the difference between meeting the 1949 guidelines and those of 1988 is the difference between $50,000 and as much as $1.5 million.

“If asked to bring the building to 100% of modern earthquake-proof requirements . . . well, we just can’t do it,” Gregg said. “It would be totally impractical and doesn’t make sense economically.”

Richard McCann, the Pasadena architect hired by the foundation to evaluate the theater, said the building could satisfy the 1949 requirements--the 25% provision--merely by connecting the roof and floor more firmly to the walls.

McCann said that “hundreds of old buildings” adhere to the 1949 standards and “pose no major threat” to themselves or the people who use them. He called adherence to the 1988 guidelines “unfair and unreasonable.”

McCann said he has worked on restoring old buildings in San Francisco, Seattle and Anchorage--cities where the risk of a major earthquake is, in his opinion, greater--but that San Diego’s guidelines are “more rigid than those in any city I know of.”

“I don’t understand the logic of the code, as it’s interpreted in San Diego,” McCann said. “It makes no sense to say that because a building is deficient in one technical area (the tie between the roof and walls), that you then have to restore an entire building.

“I don’t know why (the city’s) position would be adversarial (with the North Park Theatre Foundation), but that is the way it seems,” he said.

Assistant City Manager Maureen Stapleton and Rhea Khulman, who works in the city manager’s office, were on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Gregg said the foundation believes it could satisfy the 1949 requirements with $50,000 and completely renovate the theater with another $300,000. He said the group hopes to reopen the theater as a combination movie palace and arts center for ethnic interests.

“If allowed to reopen, we could end up being the last one-screen movie house with 1,000 seats or more in the entire city,” Gregg said. “We hope to have movies, concerts, road shows, stage events and be a showcase for minority arts productions.

“Those groups, like dozens of small theatrical and musical companies in San Diego, are hungry for a space,” he said. “We could be it. We could satisfy a need that desperately needs to be satisfied.”

City planner Buckley, who has an interest in historical preservation, said that, if the North Park dies, “it would be a sorry commentary on the way we do things around here.”

Buckley recently opposed the City Council’s decision not to designate the California Theatre a historic landmark. The California, built in 1927, is, like several Depression-era theaters in San Diego, dormant. It is scheduled to be demolished to make way for a high-rise office building.

Buckley said that, recently, he had studied Minneapolis, which purchased several theaters in the city’s core and “has all of them open and functioning. It’s an especially important idea downtown, where life should be more than 8 to 5 Monday through Friday,” he said.

Along those lines, David Allsbrook, projects director for the Centre City Development Corp., the agency in charge of downtown redevelopment, said Friday that his organization has recently taken a more vigorous position in trying to renovate and reopen the Balboa Theatre near Horton Plaza.

Like the North Park, it has lain dormant for years.

Allsbrook said the CCDC is now working closely with the Balboa Theatre Foundation to “formulate a plan” whereby a full-time operator would be appointed “and private funding solicited to get the thing renovated and reopened. We’re tired of waiting around.”

A past CCDC study indicated that renovating the Balboa could cost as much as $11 million. Allsbrook said CCDC officials now believe the job could be done for much less.