Two thousand five hundred and fifty Mission Street holds one of the more remarkable rooms in San Francisco, and most people who buy a ticket there do not know it. The auditorium opened on the sixth of May 1916 with Mary Pickford in Poor Little Peppina, seated fifteen hundred people, and was designed by the Reid Brothers in a Spanish Colonial Revival style.
Karpo can tell you what is playing at the New Mission tonight and how the Mission Street evening is running before you commit to a late showing.
The building's actual history
In the 1920s Timothy Pflueger designed the outer lobby, the marquee and the seventy-foot blade sign in the Art Deco style then in fashion. That sign still stands on Mission Street and it is the most visible piece of the building from the pavement.
The theatre was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 and designated San Francisco Landmark number 245 in 2004. It then sat unused for a long stretch before Alamo Drafthouse restored it and reopened it as a five-screen complex on the seventeenth of December 2015, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
What the restoration actually did
The conversion divided an enormous single auditorium into five screens while retaining the historic fabric that mattered — the lobby, the sign, and the architectural character of the main house. That is a genuinely difficult piece of work and it is the reason the building is in use rather than derelict.
The main auditorium retains the sense of the original room, and it is worth checking which screen your film is in when you book. A film in the big house is a different experience from one in a smaller converted screen, and the difference is the whole reason to choose this cinema over a multiplex.
The Alamo policies apply here too
The chain's no-tolerance approach to talking and texting operates at this location as it does at all of them, and it is enforced. Table service during the film is available, with a full food and drink menu ordered from your seat.
Order during the pre-show rather than during the film. The pre-show itself is curated material rather than commercials and starts before the advertised showtime, which is why arriving fifteen minutes early is the norm here rather than an inconvenience.
Formats, including 70mm
The cinema screens digitally and in 70mm, which puts it in a small group of Bay Area venues capable of showing large-format film prints properly. For a certain kind of release that is the difference between seeing the film as intended and seeing an approximation of it.
Check the format when you book. If a film is being presented in 70mm it will be specified, and those screenings sell out faster than the digital ones because the audience for them travels.
Mission Street around it
The cinema sits on Mission Street between 21st and 22nd, in the middle of one of San Francisco's densest food and nightlife corridors. The 24th Street and 16th Street BART stations are both a short walk, which makes this one of the easiest cinemas in the city to reach without a car.
That geography is the practical argument for choosing it. A film here can be preceded by a taqueria and followed by a bar within two blocks in either direction, and the whole evening happens on foot. Very few American cinemas sit inside a neighbourhood that dense.
Practical notes
The phone number is (415) 549-5959 and showtimes are published on the chain's site. Screenings run late enough that a nine or ten o'clock start is normal at weekends, which fits the neighbourhood's rhythm rather than fighting it.
Parking on Mission Street is difficult and largely pointless given the BART access. If you are drinking with the film — and the table service makes that easy — the transit route is the sensible plan rather than an afterthought at eleven at night.
Timing a screening around the neighbourhood
The useful pattern is an early evening film and a late dinner, rather than the reverse. The Mission's kitchens run later than most of San Francisco, so a seven o'clock screening leaves you walking out at nine into a neighbourhood that is still fully open, which is the opposite of what happens downtown.
If you go the other way and eat first, keep an eye on the clock — the taquerias on Mission are fast but the sit-down rooms on Valencia are not, and arriving at the cinema fifteen minutes after the pre-show has started means eating your dinner twice as fast as you wanted to.
Why it is worth choosing
San Francisco has lost a great many of its historic cinemas, and the ones that survive mostly survive as something else. This one survives as a cinema, which is rarer and better, and the restoration means the building is being used for the purpose it was designed for.
Book the main auditorium if you can, arrive early for the pre-show, and look up at the ceiling before the lights go down. It is a 1916 room that came very close to being lost, and watching a film in it is a different proposition from watching the same film in a box.
- Address: 2550 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, between 21st and 22nd Streets
- Phone: (415) 549-5959
- The auditorium opened 6 May 1916, designed by the Reid Brothers in Spanish Colonial Revival style
- Timothy Pflueger designed the lobby, marquee and 70-foot Art Deco blade sign in the 1920s
- National Register of Historic Places in 2001; San Francisco Landmark #245 in 2004
- Reopened as a five-screen Alamo Drafthouse on 17 December 2015
- Formats include digital and 70mm; check which screen and format you are booking
- Getting there: 16th Street and 24th Street BART are both a short walk; do not drive
Tags: #MoviesNearMe #SanFrancisco #AlamoDrafthouse #NewMission #MissionStreet #ArtDeco #HistoricTheatre #WatchParties #DineInCinema #SFMovies #SeventyMillimetre #MissionDistrict #Cinema
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Ask Karpo first
Ask Karpo what is showing at the New Mission tonight, how late the last screening runs, and where on Mission Street is still serving afterwards.
