"It's been a long great run but it's over. The cinema is closed. The city killed it."
So began an impassioned email sent last week to subscribers of the Columbia City Cinema newsletter and posted on the cinema's home page. Written by theater owner Paul Doyle, the "Cinema's Farewell Address" lamented that after "seven wonderful years," the cinema would shut its doors because the "city finally forced us out of business."
But a representative for the city disagreed, saying that Doyle chose to close down the two-story, three-screen theater of his own volition. A single issue sat at the crux of the cinema-said/city-said quarrel: The cinema's lack of fire sprinklers.
According to Doyle, the city had requested a meeting with him last year when officials discovered the cinema had no sprinklers. Another meeting had been planned, but before it took place, Doyle wrote, the city closed the cinema, located at 4816 Rainier Ave. S.
Eventually, a temporary occupancy permit was issued and two of the screening rooms were re-opened. But by then, the closure had cost the cinema "over $80,000 in lost revenue and made it impossible to think about sprinklers during that period."
From that point on, Doyle wrote, he found himself trapped in a labyrinthine regulatory process involving permit extension requests, denials of those requests, appeals, partial openings of screening rooms and adversarial meetings with city officials. Through it all, the cinema still needed to raise some $35,000 for initial sprinkler installation.
But in a May 4 letter, Fire Marshall Diane M. Sugimura wrote that the cinema, which is housed in a building that originally had been a Masonic Lodge, had never obtained a permit to operate a movie theater. Therefore, it had been open illegally.
Sugimura confirmed that, over the past 12 months, Doyle and the city had met multiple times, with the city stressing the need for "additional safety upgrades" of sprinklers and safer exits. In that year, no construction permit had been obtained, she wrote, and no feasible plan to make safety changes had been presented.
The city, she noted, even provided another option: If Doyle reduced the capacity by operating only one screen -- with three screening rooms, the cinema sat 200 -- it could operate without sprinklers. That option, she wrote, remains open.
"The City recognizes the importance of this local institution," she wrote, "but we would be doing a disservice to the community if we allow the cinema to continue to operate in its current configuration without considering the safety of the public."
Doyle had hoped he could raise the money for sprinkler installation in the coming months, during a summer season full of potential blockbusters. But in his email, he admitted defeat.
Closing the cinema, Doyle let readers know, would force 12 people out of work, lead to a vacant building, deprive the city of $90,000 in sprinkler hookup revenue and taxes, and cause the cinema to file for bankruptcy.
The last film shown at the cinema was an independent feature starring Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti. Spelled out on the marquee, its title seemed to express irony at the loss of the neighborhood's only theater. It was called "Win Win."