curtain up!

For 60 years it hung in the loft above the stage, a forgotten piece of artistry from vaudeville days. But when North Hollywood’s El Portal Center for the Arts reopened earlier this year after a five-year renovation, the 38-foot-wide, 24-foot-high fire curtain resumed its place in the spotlight--in full display, two feet downstage from that other red velvet house curtain.

Made and installed in 1926 by L.A.-based Armstrong Studios (estimated cost: $1,200 to $1,500) to protect the audience from onstage flare-ups (of the smoke and flames variety), the asbestos fabric curtain features a late-Renaissance-style oil painting of a Spanish galleon setting sail. California artist Alson Clark, who painted similar fire curtains at the Pasadena Playhouse and the dearly departed Carthay Circle Theater, created the El Portal’s in brilliant blue-green, sepia and ocher colors. Live theater performances required a fire curtain for safety purposes, as they do today.

Theater architects R.F. McCann & Co. refurbished the curtain after the theater sustained significant damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Though not too much worse for wear (no tears or fading), it needed EPA-approved encapsulating and re-rigging--a three-month job costing $28,000. An electro-mechanical suspension system now replaces the counterweights that once held the curtain in place. But you’ll still find the same hand lines of hemp rope and aircraft cable first put up when Calvin Coolidge was president.