Across the street and one storefront west. 1727 Haight has had two distinct lives, both of them long-running neighborhood anchors.
From 1991 to 2011 it was the second home of the Red Vic Movie House, an employee-owned collective theater founded in 1980 by six cinema people inside the Red Victorian Hotel a block away. The Red Vic was known for its couches instead of theater seats, its homemade snack fare, and for screening films you couldn’t see anywhere else: documentaries, foreign cinema, midnight cult movies, queer film festivals. It moved to 1727 Haight in 1991, converted a former restaurant into a 200-seat house, and kept the couches. The Red Vic closed on July 25, 2011, after 31 years, as streaming took over home viewing.
In 2021 The Booksmith moved in, the independent bookstore that has been a Haight Street fixture since 1976. Booksmith was founded by Gary Frank at 1746 Haight and moved to 1644 Haight in 1985. Christin Evans and Praveen Madan bought it from Frank in 2007. Allen Ginsberg gave one of his last public readings at the Booksmith on December 16, 1996, a few months before his death in April 1997. Author events, signings, neighborhood meetings, and political organizing all happen here.
Before you continue, look up and across the street. The second floor of the old Park Masonic Hall at 1748 Haight was the I-Beam, a disco opened by Sanford Kellman on October 17, 1977 that became the city’s defining new wave and punk venue. The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Public Image Ltd., Wire, Killing Joke, the Replacements, R.E.M., and Nick Cave all played it on early U.S. tours, and by the late 1980s it ran weekly hip-hop, goth, and acid-house nights. It closed in 1994. The building still stands. The second floor is still up there.