FRESNO
At first, few in the neighborhood paid attention to the churchgoers filing into the Tower Theatre on Sunday mornings.
It was pre-pandemic and just another audience at the historic Art Deco theater with its neon orb atop an 80-foot tower. But as Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater across the street went dark, the gay bar silent and the Tower District’s lively sidewalks emptied, the devout continued to meet for months, drawing local ire.
In January it became public that Adventure Church was buying the theater, the neighborhood’s namesake and economic anchor.
“That’s when things went wackydoodle,” said Heather Parrish, co-director of the Rogue, an annual fringe arts festival and one of the organizers of an effort to stop the sale. “This is the historic center of progressive bohemia in Fresno. An evangelical church operating in the heart of it strikes at the culture we’ve built for decades.”