Celia Jiménez here, thinking about El Rey in downtown Salinas and the place it will become, from the new large black and white sign outside to what it hides behind closed doors.
One of the reasons I’m fascinated by it is because I love working with my hands. There isn’t anything more satisfying than creating something little by little. That’s what Kurt Mayer, the El Rey Theater owner, has done over the past five years.
Mayer says he’s trying to preserve the theater’s history. That means keeping burn marks on the wooden stalls (back in the ‘30s, spectators could smoke while watching a movie) and removing thick layers of paint from the walls.
When Mayer saw El Rey, he didn’t see a decaying building; he saw the opportunity of what it could become.
“I felt and I could see that we could make it much better,” he says.
Mayer showed a project he was working on for over a week, which required removing the paint from the stage’s bottom lighting system, cleaning screws, finding the right sockets and screws on eBay (he only needed four screws, but the minimum order was 200). “We could do it sloppy, but that's not the right way,” he says. “It's not the way it should be.”
The theater is a work of love, and Mayer and painter Miguel De La Vara are the only two people working on it.
One of the gems at the theater is a 1930s-era air circulation system behind the scenes. “Look how smooth it is,” Mayer says proudly.
One of the most prominent parts of the theater is a colorful fountain that features similar shapes to those that appear in the frescos on the walls. Mayer says the shapes look like a crown on the top. “I call them scallops. This is like a key to a map,” he says.
I wrote a story about El Rey in last week’s edition of the Weekly and I was fascinated by what Mayer and De La Vara have found during their restoration: from a pair of old shoes, an old red and white popcorn tub and hundreds of rounded pellets they say kids threw at the screen back in the day with their slingshots.
Mayer and De La Vara are creating a new history at the theater, and once it is completed the curtain at El Rey will open once again. Hopefully it will be a lively place that brings people together like it did in the past.
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