'Now is the time': Bob Baker Marionette Theater to make Highland Park its forever home
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In 2019, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater needed a lifeline.Forced out of its edge-of-downtown home of more than 55 years, the beloved troupe with its thousands of handcrafted puppets — a saucy black cat in heels, a fish out of water that can’t help but wiggle — ultimately found a new location in a Highland Park theater.
Signing a 10-year lease was a sigh of relief for the company, the result of a lengthy search that included more than 80 spaces and ensured its playful, fanciful shows would continue to be a multigenerational, SoCal tradition.But yearly rises in rent, as well as the looming end of the contract, remained a cause of stress for the nonprofit.
The Bob Baker Marionette Theater can exhale once again.The theater’s executive team said it has entered into an agreement to purchase its current location at the corner of York Boulevard and North Avenue 50, which had former incarnations as a movie theater and a Korean church.
Once completed, the $5 million acquisition will ensure the theater has a permanent home, a place where skateboarding clowns and leek-haired onions can continue to frolic and dance for decades to come.“This is monumental for us,” says Alex Evans, the theater’s co-executive director.
“It’s been decades of us struggling to survive.Now we’re at this moment where it’s not a struggle.
It’s a blossoming moment where our future is set up forever.”Bob Baker’s Highland Park home was originally built as the York Theater in 1925, hosting movies and vaudeville performances during that era.It most recently housed the Pyong Kang First Congregational Church.
Over the years it has also been a barbershop and the site of an organ sales and repair store.Travel & Experiences Oakland’s Children’s Fairyland, which turned 75, is an argument that storytelling, combined with old-fashioned play, has a timeless appeal.The purchase comes at a ...