The Sydney Goldstein Theater, formerly the Nourse Theater and Nourse Auditorium, is a 1,687-seat venue located at 275 Hayes Street,

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

, California. It is host to the

City Arts & Lectures City Arts & Lectures produces onstage conversation at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Founded by Sydney Goldstein in 1980, City Arts & Lectures produces more than fifty live events a year and records most events for edited and delayed broadca ...

series as well as podcast tapings and conversations with notable writers and cultural figures.

History

Built in 1926 in the

Spanish Revival The Spanish Colonial Revival Style ( es, Arquitectura neocolonial española) is an architectural stylistic movement arising in the early 20th century based on the Spanish Colonial architecture of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. In the ...

style as a part of the High School of Commerce, it was used as an auditorium for student events and assemblies until it was closed in 1952. The theater was used intermittently for pageants and live music concerts until 1985 when the auditorium was temporarily converted to a courtroom for a large asbestos exposure case. It was one of the first “wired” courtrooms with computers linked to a mainframe in Texas used to share documents. After the end of the trial, it was no longer used as a public venue, serving only as a storage facility for the San Francisco Unified School District for nearly 30 years. In 2013, when the

Herbst Theatre The Herbst Theatre is an auditorium in the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center in the Civic Center, San Francisco. The 928-seat hall hosts programs as diverse as ''City Arts & Lectures'', SF Jazz, and San Francisco Performances. Architectu ...

was closed for repairs, the founder of the City Arts and Lectures program, Sydney Goldstein, renovated the Nourse Theater and made it the new home of the program. In 2018, following Goldstein's death, the theater was renamed in her honor.

References

{{reflist Theatres in San Francisco Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in California 1926 establishments in California