Beginnings 

With more than a century of history, the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma is home to generations of memories, artists — and even ghosts. Its physical foundation is marked by fire, earthquake, scandal, even near-demolition, and yet it has always risen from the ashes as a shelter for all the people who need it. Painted with lifetimes of multicolored, layered chaos, the walls are as much a gallery of creativity as a memorial for the departed. Despite every part of it being destroyed and replaced, despite its many names, the soul of the Phoenix has remained unchanged since its birth.

In December 1905 the theater opened as the Hill Opera House with a performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” by the famous Ben Greet Players. The wealthy Josie Hill, who built and owned it, envisioned it as a venue of high-class theater and refined extravagance. When Petaluma was still a small town of under 5,000 people and hoof-trod cobblestone roads, it was the city’s first theater. 

Today, the Phoenix stands as a safe haven for alternative music and counterculture, but even from its inception, the location was no stranger to unintentionally breaking social norms. Shortly after the Hill Opera House opened, it faced scandal for hosting vaudeville acts that challenged conventions. These acts often were sexually suggestive for the time, satirizing police, politicians and the wealthy owning-class.

When the venue became a gathering place for women, immigrants and the working-class, Josie Hill grew dismayed enough by her proximity to the common people that she changed the program, emphasizing films that appealed to more delicate middle-class sensibilities. Little did Josie Hill know what would become of the Hill Opera House a lifetime later.

According to its wikipedia article, as well as many other sources, the Hill Opera House suffered its first fire around 1922, which caused it to be rebuilt as a movie theater. This information can be traced back to the old Phoenix Theater website, yet there is no mention of a fire in any contemporary newspaper articles about the Hill Opera House.

“I had a conversation with an old local that used to play organ for the theater during the silent movies,” said Tom Gaffey, who has managed the Phoenix Theater since 1984 and informed the old website. “He told me about a fire that started next door and burned the south side, stage area of the building.”

Though it’s very possible that a minor fire did occur in the early 1920s, the claim that it caused enough significant damage to the building to necessitate rebuilding is certainly untrue. The actual story of how the Hill Opera House became a movie theater is, tragically, far less dramatic.

In the 1920s, the venue passed through several hands before falling under the ownership of T&D Jr. Enterprises, operated by Mike Naify, before he passed the responsibility to his brother, Sergius “Doc” Naify. They chose to renovate the theater, not because it was damaged, but as a business decision. The interior was completely gutted and rebuilt as a dedicated movie theater, reopening in 1925 as the California Theater.

Doc Naify managed the theater for more than three decades, becoming a beloved member of the community who is still remembered for fostering the welcoming, open-to-all atmosphere of the Phoenix that persists to this day. 

Gaffey cited Naify as a major inspiration for taking charge of the venue. Though Gaffey never personally spoke with Naify, his legacy is part of the building’s lifeblood.

“People would ask if I met Doc Naify,” Gaffey said. “In ninth grade, I’d heard so many stories. One day I’m sitting on the stage before the theater opened up and I said, ‘God I want to come back and run this place one day; I want to be like Doc Naify.’”

Under Naify’s management, the California Theater — with its state-of-the-art projection system and generously decorated interior — became the central pillar of Petaluma’s cinema culture throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. 

The massive fire that later gave the Phoenix its namesake happened in 1957, destroying the building’s roof and damaging the interior. It was remodeled and reopened once more a few years later, just in time for a young Gaffey to enter the picture. 

Gaffey first attended the theater at around the age of 5, during a 1960 showcase of “Old Yeller.” One childhood memory at the theater stands out: The time he saw Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” in 1963, and a group of high school seniors released pigeons in the building.

His journey to becoming proprietor of the historic theater began with a bunch of panicked adults trampling him in a bird-infested room. This led to his first nickname at the theater, “the boy who was crying about the birds.” Gaffey clarified that his fear as a 7-year-old was more about the trampling than the pigeons.

“I didn’t see the birds. I was not afraid of the birds. I want to make that perfectly clear,” he said.

Suffering economic hardship due to the rise of television, the building was sold again, this time to Santa Rosa theater operator Dan Tocchini, in 1968. He renamed it the Showcase Theater, the name Gaffey came to associate with his upbringing.

As a junior high school student, Gaffey worked at the Showcase Theater. During his adolescence, he learned how to operate projectors and manage a theater. 

Wikipedia, being famously reliable about niche subjects, says that Gaffey renamed the Showcase to the Phoenix in 1984. While several sources report this as fact, it’s verifiably false. Fear not though, because the story of Tom Gaffey is plenty fascinating without the need for dubiously accurate mythologizing.

Former Phoenix manager Larry “The Hat” Lautzker, credits the Tocchini family with the venue’s mythological title. According to Lautzker, they renamed it the Phoenix during a 1979 renovation. They named it for its ability to always rise from the ashes, whether metaphorically or literally. 

Shortly later, Joel Coopersmith purchased the Phoenix from the Tocchini family in 1979. During an approximately 3-year-period from 1980 to late 1983, Coopersmith leased it to Lautzker and John Spillaine. 

They ran a very prolific booking group called “Aquarius Productions.” Under their management, the Phoenix experienced its first explosion of rock and live music. The Ramones played the venue’s first ever punk show in 1981, years before punk at the Phoenix would truly take off. 

“We brought music to Sonoma County. We were the first ones to really bring in national acts, whether it was Van Morisson or Carlos Santana or Huey Lewis,” Lautzker said. “We brought in the most famous bands of the day.”

This period of the Phoenix’s history was as glorious as it was short. Today, there are almost no accurate records of those years, despite their immense influence on the venue’s future. It was Coopersmith, Lautzker and Spillaine who gave the Phoenix the guts of a modern music venue. The emergence of Sonoma County live music may have been revolutionary, but it was certainly not profitable. 

“We did live theater for the community, mud wrestling, and we ran movies during the week. At the end of the day, Sonoma County couldn’t support it,” Lautzker said. “We lost a lot of money doing it, but we had a good time.”

In late 1983, Coopersmith sold the Phoenix to Marin County developer Ken Frankel. It was Frankel who brought Gaffey back into the story.

In 1984, Gaffey found himself working with friends to flip failing theaters. During his last flip, a fateful one-year contract with Frankel to get the Phoenix on the market, he was grandfathered into management. Unable to sell the place, he took out a lease and has run the Phoenix ever since. 

“This was the longest one-year project I’ve ever been involved in,” Gaffey said.

The Phoenix Goes Punk

Gaffey finished what Aquarius Productions started, helping the Phoenix to grow into a legendary live music venue. Completely removed from its old days as an establishment for opera and theater, it became the North Bay capital of punk, rock and metal.

Around 1986, he brought in folk-punk band The Violent Femmes to play at the Phoenix. The venue sold out; Gaffey worked with his first mosh pit and after that, the Phoenix only got louder. Alternative subculture thrived in the ’80s Bay Area, with vanloads of energetic new bands willing to play to anyone who’d have them.

“We found ourselves at a pivotal moment in East Bay punk. Rancid, Operation Ivy. Primus and Mr. Bungle. So many bands from L.A. were coming through that a lot of clubs didn’t want. Not a lot of people wanted to have Gwar,” Gaffey said.

Gwar is a dramatic heavy metal band which carries a vast mythology and a reputation for showering their audiences in fake gore. Gaffey remembers their time at the Phoenix fondly: “They threw me in the meat grinder and spewed my guts out at the audience one night. It was incredible. It took my crew about six months to find all the pieces and put me back together. This is the best they came up with.”

Gaffey introduced weekend teen dances to the Phoenix in 1987, making it an open space for hundreds of bored teenagers thrilled at the prospect of having a place to hang out and have some fun. With the massive success of these events, the theater received heavy backlash over complaints of Saturday-night traffic and an excess of teenage hedonism.

Despite the legal battles and pushback from concerned citizens, Gaffey never backed down from making the Phoenix a safe gathering place for all. With the addition of indoor skate ramps, an arcade, art programs, music instruction, a teen health center and work opportunities, it became an oasis for teenagers in a cultural desert of spaces made for them.

It was – and remains for that matter – one of the few places where adolescents could freely hang out without pressure. Unlike those of many schools and households, the adult mentors try to respect them as people and provide for their needs without judgment. The weird kids, artists and angsty teenagers of Sonoma County have always benefited from community. 

The Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the theater in 1989, but being the Phoenix, it quickly recovered with some renovations. By that point, the building had developed a thick skin full of gumption, and it would take more than a petty earthquake to topple it.

Through the ’90s and into the 2000s, the Phoenix sold out multiple times a week. The staff may not have been wealthy, but they made up for that with the spectacular fun of it all.

“I look back on those times and wonder, ‘Why was I always broke in those days?’ It was because tickets were always $5,” Gaffey said. “The bands were getting paid well, which was good, and my staff was getting paid so there wasn’t much left over once the shows were done. We were flat-broke, but we were having a damn good time.”

In the late ’90s a tragedy struck that became forever ingrained in the venue’s heart. Sublime was a massively influential reggae-punk band from Long Beach. On May 24, 1996, the group played its final show at the Phoenix Theater. Lead singer Bradley Nowell was found dead from a heroin overdose in his hotel room the next morning.

Today, the mural memorializing Nowell still looks out from the wall of the Phoenix’s green room. Though he’s gone, three decades of musicians have practiced, laughed and wrung their hands with pre-show nerves under the watch of his memory.

All this time, the Phoenix Theater had remained on the market, and in the year 2000, it sold to a developer. Supporters of the Phoenix across generations came together with an outpouring of love to rally for the venue. Just a few weeks before the building was set to close and become an office building —  as Gaffey sold off equipment and prepared to pack up his life — a guardian angel arrived.

Paul Elliot, along with three other telecom engineers who’d recently come into money, bought the venue back from the developer and established it as a nonprofit. All of them had been musicians, with two having an especially close relationship to the Phoenix.

“Basically, Paul loved what we did when his kids and their friends were hanging out here. We’re still doing pretty much the same thing. Hanging out,” Gaffey said.

Gaffey has maintained much of that same philosophy for the last 26 years. The theater’s services have expanded to continue serving the community. It has featured punk, metal, rock, rap, hardcore, jazz, ska, blues, reggae and just about every other genre and microgenre that musicians have yet named. All are welcome. After all, it’s called everybody’s theater for a reason. 

Ghosts

Anywhere that people gather, ghost stories will do the same. Through spooky teenage rumors and decades of ghost hunts, anybody who’s decently familiar with the Phoenix Theater is sure to be acquainted with its spectral inhabitants. Yet, with every exhalation of hearsay, the Phoenix only inhales another ghost. 

“I know about the ghosts,” said Milo Ward, guitarist and frontperson of the band, MJ Ward. “I’ve come here for a really long time, so you just hear the stories around.”

From his childhood, Gaffey himself has had many firsthand encounters with the Phoenix’s anomalies. A building this old has a lot of logical explanations for strange noises and sights. Some cases probably amount to the building shifting, noisy plumbing or kids pulling pranks, but just as many occurrences remain inexplicable. Human perception is flawed and ghosts probably aren’t real, but we can still ask, “what if?”

“I’m not even telling you I believe in ghosts, just to hedge my bets. But I won’t stay in an old hotel. Ever,” Gaffey said.

He remembers sleeping onstage in the theater as a kid and hearing the steps of his first Phoenix ghost. In the decades since, he’s continued to treat Chris the Giant as the childhood friend he is.

“We’d hear these big footsteps coming over the stage and stomping right over us,” Gaffey said. “Didn’t feel bad at all, felt like he was just kinda checking us out. We named him Chris. He was huge; you could just feel the footsteps.”

Gaffey also recalls a story involving one of the Phoenix’s old security workers. They were setting up for a Gwar show late one night when the worker emerged from the lower exit of the tower and reported seeing a little kid backstage. Despite no little kids being in the theater that night, the worker was absolutely certain of what he’d seen.

“He left then and there, quit and did not come back. It’s his real ghost story. He really saw this little kid,” Gaffey said.

The third major ghost Gaffey mentioned was a woman who once haunted the girl’s bathroom. Apparently, she was a large and terrifying spirit who would harass the staff at night. It started back in 1984, when Gaffey first started managing the venue.

“When I got here, there were two janitors who would not clean the girls’ bathroom by themself,” Gaffey said.

On Friday the 13th, in January of 1984, Gaffey’s friend brought in a ghost hunter from the Berkeley Psychic Institute. The ghost hunter, armed with an array of various paranormal antennas, gizmos and gadgets, apparently corroborated the existence of Chris, as well as the Lady in the Bathroom. After the ghost hunter directed her towards “the light,” her influence vanished, never to return.

These first three ghosts are just the beginning, because it turns out the Phoenix is absolutely rife with hauntings. That is, if you take the eclectic cast of Phoenix ghost hunters for their word. Is it possible that a massive number of people over several decades looking for ghosts are just statistically likely to find a massive number of ghosts? Don’t think about it.

TV ghost hunter Amy Bruni grew up investigating the ghosts of the Phoenix Theater. In 2010, she ran an event aptly called “Ghosts of the Phoenix,” in which participants joined her on a tour of the building and learned the haunting ropes of ghost hunting.

Down in the basement, they communicated with one ghost who Gaffey was well aware of. He knew this hot-tempered poltergeist for the constant object-flinging physical destruction it enacted on the basement. Gaffey was outraged when the ghost told him to “get out” during this communication. He says they’ve made up since then, but still have their differences.

“I’m like, ‘Get out? You know what? Screw you. I’m the guy who has to come down here when the basement floods.’ I’ve changed my tactic. We’re friends now,” Gaffey said. “This is where he and I have our issues: If you’re going to haunt something, why are you going to haunt a basement that floods?”

Now, to finally answer the big question: ‘What’s up with the ghost on the balcony?’

If you grew up going to the Phoenix, it’s likely you’ve heard about this particular entity. The balcony was blocked off to the public for years, so its mystery has only grown in the community’s imagination. Many rumors have arisen about a ghost up there, with some stories telling of a kid who fell off the balcony and still haunts it.

The truth of the balcony is, once again, tragically far less dramatic. Gaffey keeps it locked mainly because the low-quality chairs are not up to Phoenix standards. In fact, a group of ghost hunters from Penngrove disproved the balcony ghost as a trick of the light.

“If you have a guitar flashing in the lights, it sends a shadow image up across the door there. People would be saying there’s somebody up there, but no,” Gaffey said. “They were able to disprove that one.”

Hold the disappointment though, because there’s a much more compelling ghost story about the balcony’s projection booth. Today, the booth has been refashioned into a secret practice studio, but it was used for many years when the venue was a movie theater.    

“The ghost hunters from Penngrove got a really good vocal hit up in the projection booth, and we do know in the ’50s a projectionist did have a heart attack and die up on those stairs,” Gaffey said.

He’s had his scraps with this particular ghost, recalling a time when the projector room ghost would make noises late at night while he was closing up the theater.

“You can’t assume it’s ghosts, because that’s just ridiculous. You have to assume it’s a human being. So now I have to go up there all by myself. I let it happen twice, funny joke. By the third time, I’m ready to do battle with any ghost,” Gaffey said.

Though he maintains a healthy skepticism about the ghosts’ existence, Gaffey plays it safe. If the ghosts do exist, he hopes they are willing to work with him to keep the spirit of the Phoenix more alive than they are.

“We have to run a theater for the people, the living people who pay the bills,” Gaffey said. “If you guys want this to be a theater that you can haunt, then you better not mess with us too much, or else you’re gonna be haunting a big empty building that’ll be an office one day. Quit messing around here. We’re all in this together.”

The Phoenix Today

The Phoenix is still going strong 120 years after it opened as the Hill Opera House. On any particular weekend, you are sure to see kids skating inside, bands of all sizes performing and Tom Gaffey holding the whole thing together.

It’s less a straight-forward music venue and more like a D.I.Y. indoor city, complete with its own variety of attractions, events and cultures. The venue is still a home for members of many music subcultures, including punk, hardcore, metal, screamo and more. Even people who belong to none of these groups are made welcome to participate in the community.

The Side Room Skateshop, also founded by Gaffey, is a nonprofit which operates directly out of the Phoenix Theater. The shop helps provide teenagers with on-the-job experience and encourages the next generation of the Phoenix’s skateboarders.

Every year Halloween and Christmas events are held in which audience-members get to dress up and enjoy silly covers. Harkening back to its days as a movie theater, the Phoenix hosts an interactive screening of the cult-classic Rocky Horror Picture Show at least once a year.

Relatively recently, in September 2025, wildly successful indie-pop musician Mac DeMarco played two sold-out shows at the Phoenix Theater. Hosting an artist with more than 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify, the Phoenix still has it.

Yet while the theater is well known for hosting many famous artists, and continues to do so, its greater impact is arguably in its support of smaller, local bands. Bands like Green Day, now famous worldwide, wouldn’t have gotten their start without venues like the Phoenix which support local Bay Area musicians.

“This was the place where I played my very first show when I was 14. It’s always been such a great, welcoming environment,” Ward said.

Ward isn’t an outlier here; many musicians in the local scene got their start at the Phoenix when they were very young. Even the person writing this article got to play their first amazingly sloppy, amateur show at the Phoenix as a clueless teenager. Oftentimes, local teenage musicians suck, but it’s important that they have a space to suck so they can grow.

“The Phoenix was a gateway for me to become more social and find friends. It really altered my life, being the first place where I started going to shows,” said show-going SRJC student Lexi Baccei. “I think it does pertain to a younger crowd for the smaller shows. Feeling like I’ve grown out of it, I’ve moved on to bigger things like going to the city and finding all the different venues out there.” 

It’s a common complaint in the current local music scene that the Phoenix crowd veers young, and that every third show is performed by a group of kids who have no idea what they’re doing. These rumors are in fact true, but that’s part of what makes the Phoenix special.

“The cool thing about the Phoenix is they bring in bands from the highest level to people who are just starting out,” longtime Phoenix-goer Michael Pickard said. “Kids, high schoolers, all coming out to the shows on weekend nights, enjoying local music.”

From the beginning of his time at the Phoenix, Gaffey has always cared about creating a space for artists of all ages. It’s great that many of these young musicians aren’t very good, because they shouldn’t need to be. This open-door policy goes all the way back to the inclusiveness of the Showcase Theater’s Doc Naify and even the admittedly accidental working-class community of the Hill Opera House.

The Phoenix has undergone enormous changes over the decades, but the spirit of the venue has stayed basically consistent since at least the ’70s. It holds a similar place in the community as it did decades ago, still hosting local bands and hyperactive teenagers through it all. 

“It feels pretty similar to me,” Pickard said. “When I walk in and see these local bands play, it’s the same vibe as 20, 25 years ago.”

Not even Gaffey knows how any of this is possible. It’s undeniably a miracle that the Phoenix even exists in the first place, let alone how it’s survived nearly unchanged for all these years. Outside of the theater, the world could not be changing faster, but on the inside, it’s a time capsule for human life. 

“Don’t ever run a business like this. This is dumb,” Gaffey said. “I don’t know how we stay open. I have a deal with God. Timing was everything, I just happened to be here at the right time. So here we are.”

The Phoenix is a house for everyone. It has the bones of Petaluma’s early days, when it was proclaimed as the greatest live music venue in the North Bay. It runs with the blood of a movie theater that welcomed all with open arms. Its guts hold those first bright, short years of rock n’ roll. It stands with the type of thick skin that can survive moshpits, fires, earthquakes and capitalism. It breathes the ghosts of people who’ve departed or maybe never were. Most importantly, its heart is that of a community which, against all odds, survives the test of time.