Here are a few Sacramento Bee articles about places of interest in Colonial Heights, along Stockton Boulevard. In 1940, a streetcar ran from 55th Street and 21st Avenue downtown via Stockton Boulevard, making Stockton a prime business street and Colonial Heights a popular suburb.
The original streetcar was operated by Central California Traction, an electric interurban railroad who operated between Stockton in Sacramento. In 1933, passenger trains from Stockton stopped, but freight trains and streetcars continued. In 1943, CCT sold their streetcar operation to National City Lines. Colonial Heights was far out in the country when first built out circa 1910, but rapidly grew into a busy suburban neighborhood, and was eventually incorporated into the city as far as 14th Avenue--later incorporations took over the rest of Colonial Heights, but the west side of Stockton along the southern end of Colonial Heights is still Sacramento County.
The Colonial Theatre opened in 1940. It was designed by Herb Goodpastor, who also designed the Tower Theater. Supposedly, Goodpastor's contract for the Tower required that he design no theater within three miles of the Tower, a circle covering all of downtown Sacramento. According to local legend, the Colonial Theatre's site was chosen because it is three miles and one foot from Tower as the crow flies.
The Colonial opened to great fanfare in 1940.
Right next door to the theater was a nightclub and restaurant, the Movie Club--it's the place with the octagonal window in the photo above.
In 1954, the Movie Club became the Circle Club.
Farther down Stockton Boulevard was Frasinetti's, owned by the Frasinetti family, whose vineyard in Florin dates to the 1890s. Frasinetti's opened in 1936 and operated at the prominent corner of Stockton Boulevard and San Francisco Boulevard, the "main street" of the Colonial Heights subdivision, recognizable by its two rows of palm trees, accessible from the Stockton Boulevard streetcar line, which ran until 1946.
In 1954, Frasinetti's became Burich's, owned by the Jim Burich family. Burich was also the operator of a long-standing downtown Sacramento bar, the Equipoise Cafe near 4th and K Street, notorious as a site for underground gambling dens. Burich's was farther out into the county, and could have been a more "family-oriented" place given its location in a suburb--or maybe it was just that much farther from the prying eyes of police who worked the West End?