Happy 100th Birthday to the Sunshine Theater and Sunshine Building! It opened on this day in 1924. It was named in honor of our state's original nickname, the Sunshine State. The Land of Enchantment eventually became our nickname, of course. It was built by Joseph Barnett, who was an important figure in the New Town of Albuquerque’s early development. He owned the earlier 1881 White Elephant Saloon structure that stood on the site previously and also built the Barnett Building across 2nd Street from the Sunshine Building years before in the early 1900s.
Below are some pics from the Albuquerque Museum's files of the structure in its early years.
Here are some pics of the structure when it was in decline and threatened with demolition. This is also when it lost its sign and marquee. It was no longer a first-run theater by the 1970s, and in the early 1980s began showing Spanish-language films.
Here's a newspaper clipping from the 1980s showing the idea to tear down the structure and rebuild the south and west facades of the Sunshine Building on the diagonally-opposite corner of 2nd Street and Central Avenue in the 1980s. It came about as a way to save and somewhat preserve the structure while it was being threatened with demolition to build the proposed Festival Marketplace.
Luckily this never happened and the original structure has survived to this day. It was all by itself on the block until the early 2000s when the Theater Block and Century 14 multiplex was built around it.
Below's a recent picture of the structure as it appears today. It's from the Homes.com profile for Downtown Albuquerque. Since the early 1990s the Sunshine Theater is now a popular live music venue. It's a vital component of Downtown Albuquerque today even if a bit shabby, altered and worse for wear.
Over at SSC we recently dreamed of the sign returning to the structure and seeing the entire structure including the the theater properly restored. I hope that happens one day!
https://www.homes.com/albuquerque-nm...downtown-area/
By the way, here are some newspaper clippings with more information and showing the plans for the Festival Marketplace that was the biggest and most controversial redevelopment proposal for Downtown Albuquerque in the mid-1980s. It was being proposed by the same corporation that developed such similar projects as Baltimore's Harborplace and the Jacksonville Landing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_marketplace
Here also is an opinion piece about the marketplace and possible loss of the Sunshine Building written by V.B. Price, who of course also wrote the book Albuquerque: A City at the End of the World and was a regular commentator for many years in both the Albuquerque Journal and Albuquerque Tribune. He's also the son of Vincent Price, which is something he never seemed to want to bring attention to or acknowledge. I believe he still lives in Albuquerque.
I absolutely would not have wanted to lose the Sunshine for this project, but I think surely it could have been adapted to be built in such a way as to preserve the Sunshine Building. It looks like it would've been mostly park space. Surely the main structure that mimicked the Alvarado Hotel could've been built in a slightly different location on the site, maybe even a block to the east at 1st and Central. I do wonder how different Downtown Albuquerque would be if this had come to fruition. I think we went down a better path, especially since most of these marketplaces that were built have also now been torn down or subject to redevelopment efforts themselves.