https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WvyXjxV6P4
ONN – Oakland Parkway Theater Closes Today May 23rd 2009: Evicted – video made by the YouTube channel in the video’s upper left hand corner.
Oakland Parkway Theater Closes Today May 23rd 2009: Evicted
I wrote this on that day….
The landlord of the Parkway Theater at 18th Street and Park Blvd in Oakland evicted the Parkway Theater after severely raising the rent. It’s last day was today, March 22nd, 2009, but the theater can be saved.
The landlord of the Parkway Theater at 18th Street and Park Blvd in Oakland evicted the Parkway Theater after severely raising the rent. It’s last day was today, March 22nd, 2009, but the theater can be saved.
As an employee reports in this video, the closure was fast; the employees got the notice just four days ago, giving them little time to make adjustments and throwing lives into chaos. Apparently, the theater just had not drawn a lot of people — or at least enough to pay the rent — to maintain itself. In the words of the persons I talked to — some on the video — the movie house was not showing what the public wanted to see.
I think a larger issue was marketing, or the lack of it. A new approach should include having ways that bloggers can put a Parkway widget on their blogs. Also having the Parkway on as many social networks — like Twitter — as possible would really keep its name out there.
The bottom line is the place Kyle Fisher and Catherine Fisher raised $140,000 to start in 1996 and opened the following year can be saved. But the landlord has to really have a different strategy and be more a part of the business than it appears they are not. A closed Parkway is a blight on that neighborhood at a time when people need reasons to feel good about what’s happening in their lives.
It’s watch time. Which business institution will fall next? Which landlord will prove not to realize that there’s not a lot of money out there and thus can’t increase rents?
Will the Parkway employees find other means of work? Will the City of Oakland, which just purchased a $7 million building with redevelopment funds step in?
The Parkway was a friend to then-Oakland Councilmember John Russo, who’s now City Attorney. They even named a sandwich after him for his support of the facility. (It’s not on the menu anymore.) Will Russo step in?
So many questions, which only mean that this whole issue is far from…closed.
Today, after a long-period where the building stood empty because its landlords insisted on being bad deal makers and the City of Oakland forgot how to do economic development, it’s now a weed dispensary. I’m not a fan of that use in a business district that should have uses for more people. I am not one bit against dispensaries at all – but I am against bad land use.
The block of 18th Street and Park is such that the Parkway Building has always served as a community gathering place for entertainment. It’s been that way for generations. Having anything less than an entertainment facility (like a a combination movie theater and Dave & Buster’s for the young people) is, to me, a massive failure.
Stay tuned.
via IFTTT
Note from Zennie62Media and OaklandNewsNow.com : this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.