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Crews called to fire at derelict theatre

Crews called to fire at derelict theatre

Yahoo01-05-2025

Emergency services were called to a fire in the basement of a derelict theatre in Derby.
Crews from the Kingsway and Nottingham Road stations were sent to the Hippodrome in Green Lane at 18:55 BST on Thursday.
A "small fire" was discovered in the cellar of the Grade II listed theatre, which dates back 1914 but was last used as a bingo hall before it shut in 2007.
Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service (DFRS) said the fire, which was extinguished using a single hose reel jet, was being treated as "suspected arson".
No injuries were reported and nobody was found inside the property, DFRS added.
The fire service said crews spent longer than usual for a fire of this scale due to the condition of the site.
While currently disused, in February the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust said it hoped to compulsory purchase the site with ambitions to bring it back into use as a music venue.
Follow BBC Derby on Facebook, on X, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk or via WhatsApp on 0808 100 2210.
Derby vision for 'Rock City-style' music venue
Derelict theatre fire treated as arson
Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service

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The Institute Camp also housed the Founders Oak, a tree that marked the site of the community's 1922 founding ceremony, and lots for independent groups, like the WE Boys and Jesus our Companion (J.O.C.), Methodist-affiliated clubs who made a former Mission Revival home into the Aldersgate Lodge (925 Haverford Ave.) in 1928. In the sylvan canyon, the Palisades Chautauqua offered a bewildering array of ways to lift oneself up: hiking and calisthenics, elocution and oratory, homemaking and child psychology, music, history, politics, literature and theater. Tinged with piety, these were, in their own words, 'high class, jazz-free resort facilities.' The official dedication of the Palisades Chautauqua on Aug. 6, 1922, would be the last of its kind in the country. It was spearheaded by Rev. Charles Holmes Scott, a Methodist minister and educational reformer who dreamed of creating the 'Chautauqua of the West.' The influence of the movement was so central to the Palisades' identity that in 1926, one of its main thoroughfares — Chautauqua Boulevard — was named in its honor. Scott, inspired by the Chautauqua tradition's ideals of self-transformation, envisioned Pacific Palisades as a place where character would matter more than commerce. 'Banks and railroads and money is always with us. But the character and integrity of our men and women is something money cannot buy. We will prove the worth of man,' Scott declared. Residents signed 99-year leases to ensure the community's cooperative nature. The leasehold model was also meant to prevent speculation, fund cultural facilities and events, and uphold moral standards. Alcohol, billboards and architectural extravagance were all prohibited — as was, alas, anyone who wasn't Protestant or white. The Palisades Assn., under Scott's guidance, purchased nearly 2,000 acres of mesa, foothills and coastline. Pasadena landscape architect Clarence Day drew up the first plans, establishing a new axis, Via de la Paz, or Way of Peace, eventually home to Pacific Palisades United Methodist Community Church (1930) and terminating at a neoclassical, Napoleonic-scaled Peace Temple, atop Peace Hill. He laid out two tracts: Founders Tract I, a tight-knit grid of streets (now known as the Alphabet Streets) for modest homes above Sunset Boulevard, and the curving Founders Tract II, closer to the coast with larger lots for more affluent residents. Soon after, Day was replaced by the renowned Olmsted Brothers, who refined the layout to follow natural contours, planted thousands of trees and designed a stately civic center in which they wanted to include a library, hotel, lake, a park with a concert grove and a far larger, permanent auditorium. Only one major element of that center was realized: Clifton Nourse's Churrigueresque-style Business Block building at Swarthmore and Sunset, completed in 1924. 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Yet fragments endured, stubbornly. In 1943, the Presbyterian Synod purchased the Chautauqua site and operated it as a retreat. In the late '70s and early '80s, local activists fought off a plan to extend Reseda Boulevard right through Temescal Canyon (though buildings like the library and assembly hall had already been torn down in anticipation of the roadway). In 1994, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy acquired the land. Today, it survives as the city-run Temescal Gateway Park, its board-and-batten cabins and rustic halls weathered but largely intact. The Business Block — since January a fire-blackened shell awaiting its undetermined fate — narrowly escaped demolition in the 1980s when a developer proposed replacing it with a concrete and glass mall. A preservationist campaign under the slogan 'Don't Mall the Palisades' saved the structure. But by then, the character of the Palisades had begun to shift. Faint echoes of the quiet, rustic past remained, but modest bungalows had given way to mansions. The artists, radicals and missionaries were largely gone. 'It's not Chautauqua anymore — it's Château Taco Bell,' Young quipped, of much of the area's soulless new built forms. Today, thanks to the fire's brutality, the original Chautauqua sites offer something unusual: a landscape where past and present momentarily coexist. Slate roofs held firm. Ancient oak groves performed better than modern landscaping. For Young, the fires stripped away modern gloss to reveal what continues to matter. 'When you go through a fire,' he said, 'you get down to the basics.' He added: 'The fires brought us back to 1928.' Pacific Palisades is one of a long list of failed California utopias. Like Llano del Rio, the socialist settlement in the Antelope Valley, or the Kaweah Colony, a cooperative in the Sierra foothills, it was a high-minded gamble dashed on the shoals of capitalism and human nature. The idealistic outpost lingers, etched into the land, embossed in the Palisades' deeper memory. The dream may no longer be intact, but its traces are still legible.

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