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A New Lease on Life
Douglas McWhirter
02/02/2004
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Hermosa Beach, Calif., a few miles to the west of downtown Los Angeles, is a low-key community of blond surfers, pink bungalows and vociferous green parrots that roost in the crowns of 80-foot date palms. About a block from the beach, on Hermosa Avenue, is the old Bijou Theater, a crown jewel of a home for the "talkies" when it was built in 1923, as well as for acts on the old vaudeville circuit. Its façade was neoclassical, and its interior was almost rococo, featuring elaborate plaster flourishes and intricate detail. But by the late 1970s, the Bijou, like many once-grand movie palaces of its vintage, was threadbare with sticky floors, a structure whose only cultural contribution to the community was in its late-night showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
 Twenty-plus years later the Bijou has a new lease on life. After a 6-month, $2 million redesign by Graft Design, the Los Angeles and Berlin-based group that counts the L.A. County Museum of Art and Brad Pitt among its clients, the theater is now home to Gallery C, a "new destination" for contemporary California art, as the energetic entrepreneurs behind the restoration put it. Michael Napoliello Jr. and Jason Moskowitz, transplants from the advertising world, display cutting-edge works of art by California artists in the renovated Bijou. Where moviegoers once sat in a dark auditor-ium before a flickering screen, art aficionados now wander through a cavernous, bright, art space, replete with large, movable display walls and glass panels that accentuate the original architectural detail of the theater. In this space, one is now keenly aware of the building’s past and future. "We weren’t so much trying to restore the building as we were trying to reinterpret it," says Napoliello.
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