Same site as the older Belmont. In the early years of Los Angeles, when the city was confined to a small area, many of the hills surrounding downtown had names…Colton Hill….Bunker Hill…Emerald Hill….Crown Hill…etc. , and during the 1880s, Crown Hill which was a bit beyond the city proper,,was where the Belmont Hotel was built. Within a few years it became a well known resort hotel, rivaling the Raymond in South Pasadena. The Hotel burned down in 1887,http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/18871216_BelmontHotelFire/12161887_BelmontHotelFire.htm, ans on the site was built the exclusive Belmont School for girls. This lasted until 1920, when the city purchased the grounds to build Belmont High School. It was finished in 1923 and lasted until 1967, when, like so many other irreplacable , rare, and architecturally significant Los Angeles buildings, was razed to make way for the ugly square modernist structure that is there today, that which you referred to as
the “older Belmont”. Belmont was hands down the most beautiful high school in Southern California, and one of the finest examples of Italiante style in the country. The architect even designed a custom brick for the buildings, a long, broad and red brick, which gave the school a unique look, and, which to this day is known as ‘Belmont Brick’ whenever ordered by contractors and architects.Nothing like exists today…perhaps the closest would be Marshall High School in Silverlake/Los Feliz, but only as a pale example indeed. Take a gander yourself. http://belmontalumni.tripod.com/ View link
Before they razed it I was able to take out about twenty seats from the interior. Me and my crew were let in by the owners, and were given permission to take anything we could remove. We almost took some of the curtains, but on closer inspection, they were pretty much decayed and moldy from severe leaks. The leaking roof also destroyed the Grand piano in the orchestra pit.We removed all of the spots, and parts of the projector and about 50 35MM film reels.Sometime during its shutdown and being boarded up before it was demolished, homeless bums snuk in and completely trashed the place…starting fires inside the Grand Piano….defecating/urinating everywhere….trash and food and needles all over….it was a real mess.We walked the catwalk over the stage(three stories high, verry scarry), and thats where we saw how messed up the 5 or 6 curtains were. One of the curtains had a magnificent painting on it, a pastoral scene, most likely from its days as a vaudeville house, but the lousy water had ruined it. Each of those curtains weighed about 1000 lbs., very heavy! Another looked like the curtains in the stage from the original King Kong. We did manage to prepare the beautiful ticket booth for removal. It was aluminum trimmed, curved glass, with Batchelder Tiles with a Palm/Parrott motif.During the night, someone swiped it. My sources in Cleveland Wrecking dont know what happened to it, and the L.A. Thetatre Conservancy, who also had the hots for it, denied taking it. I tell ya something, theatre fans, I’m getting closer to finding it now that I found a “little birdie”…and you know, it will feel great when I finally set it up in my backyard, but it will be nothing like the satisfaction I’ll get when I rip the guy’s head off who took it…..
This theatre was a favorite of Belmont High School students, the old-timers tell me. There is a great photgraph of the Belmont Theatre in the 50th Aniversarry Yearbook of Belmont High School. Sad to say that both are now gone….the beautiful Belmont Theatre was demolished in the 70s, (I remember driving by with my dad on the way to Norms in Hollywood), as was the most beautiful high school in Los Angeles, Belmont, razed in the late 60s/early 70s. L.A. Smith, the architect, also designed the Rialto, in my town, South Pasadena, and the Highland Theatre in Highland Park.
Sorry…it’s a red brick building with a white brick facade that is on the corner. I guess the Ritz would have been between that and Gus’s B-B-Q. I just came back from driving through Washington, Oregon, and Central California, and I took several pics of defunct theatres in mostly small towns, many in seedy and run-down areas.One town with two paticulary nice theatres was Lindsay, California. Every town in central CA has at least one theatre. Many have been turned into churches, storage areas or are just boarded up. In some cities, like Porterville, yuppies have moved in and are restoring the historic areas. In others, judging by the architecture and degree of decrepitude, they were probably by-passed by the railroad in the 20s and the theatres have been boarded-up since the 50s, just waiting for a rebirth at the hands of a dreamer, perhaps even someone who visits Cinema Treasures. You know,having spent years driving through California and the west I can say that without a doubt , there is no ugly or boring or uninspiring place around here.
There is a big red brick building there now, I believe it houses office space and a Papa John’s Pizza on the first floor.Is this building part of the old theatre, or is this a newer retro type building?
Hello again. About a year ago, and about 5 years after the baseball glove incident…my son and his crew of pals were walking around South Pasadena one weekend night. Before taking off for the night, I gave each of his pals, my son included, a flashlight. To my son I loaned by big black Mag-Lite, with the admonition that he should bring it back or else. When they got to the Rialto, the y noticed that the side stairway door was ajar, this being 1 hour after the midnight movie had ended. My son’s crew wanted to go exploring, but my son had recently been pinched for filming high school grudge fights, and his girlfriend, whom he had come across that evening,
disuaded from doing so. One friend had damaged his flashlite, so my son loaned him the Mag-Lite. My son went home soon after, but his friends went exploring. They were promptly caught by the night-watchmen, and the South Pasadena Police, arrested them whole bunch. I was called to pick-up some of the kids from the jail. The watchmen was there making a statement. He told me that he probably wouldnt have called the cops except that every night for the past week those kids were breaking in and mocking him by playing catch in the balcony. I told him that wasnt possible since the kids had snuk in only that one night .The od man says'“Baloney!!! Every night they’re up there running around, saying stuff like,"Watch a movie after the game”, and “slide home junior”!!! And the cops kept my Mag-Lite.
Hello again,I know for a fact that the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles is haunted. As for the Rialto, let me relate this story concerning my son.The Rialto has two side stairways on the south side of the theatre( Oxley Street). One is a stage access/fire escape, the other, boarded up, was an old access to the space behind the balcony, and once open to the office space on the second floor. This stairway has been boarded-up since the 60s, but one night my son was coming from a party in the Marengo district, and he saw the boarded-up entrance ,ajar. It had beeen raining very hard,( most of the damage in the Rialto is water damage) and the wooden doors had become warped.My son, being an urban explorer like his ol' man, pried the door open enough so he could crawl through. He always carries his little Mag-Lite, so he went exploring this section of the Rialto. There were several holes in the plaster on the second floor, and feeling behind one of the holes, he found and brought up what we later found out to be a game-used 1919 baseball glove. He pounded the glove for a while, thinking it odd that such a thing would be inside a plaster wall, then he sat down in the balcony to rest. After a while, he felt as if were being watched, he felt wind on his back, and then a sound of something sticky peeling off a surface. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he says he heard “whispers”, one of which he could make out was saying, “Watch the movie after the game”.When looked down at the bottom, near the thr right of the stage, he saw a dark figure , human glide down off the stage and silently make its way acroos the second row of seats. My son was terrified, but transfixed by this strange sight. the dark figure then made its way toward the lobby, and my son says he heard another whisper that said,“ "steal home, get out boy, get out boy..”, so he bolted down the stairs and ran back home. We still have that glove.
Hello, I have lived in South Pasadena since 1984.Around the middle 80s, the Rialto allowed live rock concerts by local San Gabriel Valley rock bands on the weekend nights. I have heard it rumoured that Armored Saint had played a gig there before they became famous. When I first moved there, I heard the bands plying, and I walked in. I had my harmonica so I jammed briefly with one of the bands. I heard that two weeks later some San Marino High School toughs tried to crash the concert and in the ensuing brawl, the very expensive,rare, and original glass doors were broken and THAT was the end of the gigs.I was surprised, because other than this
incident, South Pasadena teens are well behaved.
Say, the script that I found had extensive notes on the last three pages which are signed , “Mack” or “Mick”, and some more writing on the back page signed “Harry Edwards” and someone named “Edendale” or “Edindele”. I wonder if this had anyhting to do with United Artists.
Dudes, that young thing was Gene Scotts wife??? Holy crap, I thought it was his daughter!!! Man, she has a really terrible singing voice! Yikes! You’d think the church would hire someone to punch up her vocals, or least equalize it or add some reverb or something. Man…its painful to watch.
We also used to project movies on to walls of the surrounding buildings with one of our 16mm projectors. That was a gas, watching movies on the 12th floor wall across the parking lot. Has anyone seen the gargoyles on the building?? Many of them are movie oriented. There are several characters from drama and literature, Dickens, I believe, and several gargoyles are seen cranking the old style box movie cameras. Everyone that came to visit me was reaaly blown away by those details. Right before Gene Scot came on the scene, several of the business owners( most of them were garment industry cutters , fashion designers, filmmakers and artists), banded together and tried to obtain the masterlease, myself included,but to no avail, it was a done deal. Religion trumps creativity and art once again. Too bad. I had envisioned a colony of filmmakers and animators there.I think Charlie, Douglas and Mary would have liked that.
Needleman Enterprises owned the masterlease but relinquished it in 1999 for private reasons( I suppose because they also owned the California and Orpheum theatres, along with several other properties downtown). Metropolitan then sold the masterlease out to Gene Scott, who then propmtly evicted a few hundred business owners to make way for his church. I myself had an animation studio on the 12th floor, and during my time there I explored the building and theatre top to bottom with friends and fellow animators. I even lurked about inside the hollow tower. Once , when they tore down a wall on the tenth floor to upgrade the electricals, I fished around inside several feet of wall and pulled out a full unopened can of MJB coffee, several newspapers from 1927, a brass plumbob, a can of Hills Brothers coffee filled with buffalo nickels, a book of matches, and a partial script for a movie, and five brand-new old baseball gloves still in their original boxes, one of them with a cool black and white photo pasted on the box of someone named Mordecai Brown and another with a guy named Frank Baker. One of the old-timers that had been there since the 1930s told me that there had been a sporting goods company on the 11th floor. One of my other neighbors there also told me that one of the workmen fished out three circa 1920 brass flashlights from a 9th floor wall. I really missed that place, I had great views of the Eastern building and old downtown on one side, and from my side window I could see the new skyscraper skyline. I dont know if Metropolitan sold out to Scott or what.
Does anyone know what happened to the ticket box? It was completely covered with Batchelder tiles, with two tile parrots on either side and aluminum frames and detailing for the windows and molding.
I had hired two fellows to help me take it when they were demolishing the building, but someone swiped it during the night/early morning. Cleveland Wrecking and the L.A. theatre Conservancy , who were also after it , also dont know what happened to it. I have a feeling it wound up in some west-side backyard.
Same site as the older Belmont. In the early years of Los Angeles, when the city was confined to a small area, many of the hills surrounding downtown had names…Colton Hill….Bunker Hill…Emerald Hill….Crown Hill…etc. , and during the 1880s, Crown Hill which was a bit beyond the city proper,,was where the Belmont Hotel was built. Within a few years it became a well known resort hotel, rivaling the Raymond in South Pasadena. The Hotel burned down in 1887,http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/18871216_BelmontHotelFire/12161887_BelmontHotelFire.htm, ans on the site was built the exclusive Belmont School for girls. This lasted until 1920, when the city purchased the grounds to build Belmont High School. It was finished in 1923 and lasted until 1967, when, like so many other irreplacable , rare, and architecturally significant Los Angeles buildings, was razed to make way for the ugly square modernist structure that is there today, that which you referred to as
the “older Belmont”. Belmont was hands down the most beautiful high school in Southern California, and one of the finest examples of Italiante style in the country. The architect even designed a custom brick for the buildings, a long, broad and red brick, which gave the school a unique look, and, which to this day is known as ‘Belmont Brick’ whenever ordered by contractors and architects.Nothing like exists today…perhaps the closest would be Marshall High School in Silverlake/Los Feliz, but only as a pale example indeed. Take a gander yourself.
http://belmontalumni.tripod.com/
View link
Before they razed it I was able to take out about twenty seats from the interior. Me and my crew were let in by the owners, and were given permission to take anything we could remove. We almost took some of the curtains, but on closer inspection, they were pretty much decayed and moldy from severe leaks. The leaking roof also destroyed the Grand piano in the orchestra pit.We removed all of the spots, and parts of the projector and about 50 35MM film reels.Sometime during its shutdown and being boarded up before it was demolished, homeless bums snuk in and completely trashed the place…starting fires inside the Grand Piano….defecating/urinating everywhere….trash and food and needles all over….it was a real mess.We walked the catwalk over the stage(three stories high, verry scarry), and thats where we saw how messed up the 5 or 6 curtains were. One of the curtains had a magnificent painting on it, a pastoral scene, most likely from its days as a vaudeville house, but the lousy water had ruined it. Each of those curtains weighed about 1000 lbs., very heavy! Another looked like the curtains in the stage from the original King Kong. We did manage to prepare the beautiful ticket booth for removal. It was aluminum trimmed, curved glass, with Batchelder Tiles with a Palm/Parrott motif.During the night, someone swiped it. My sources in Cleveland Wrecking dont know what happened to it, and the L.A. Thetatre Conservancy, who also had the hots for it, denied taking it. I tell ya something, theatre fans, I’m getting closer to finding it now that I found a “little birdie”…and you know, it will feel great when I finally set it up in my backyard, but it will be nothing like the satisfaction I’ll get when I rip the guy’s head off who took it…..
This theatre was a favorite of Belmont High School students, the old-timers tell me. There is a great photgraph of the Belmont Theatre in the 50th Aniversarry Yearbook of Belmont High School. Sad to say that both are now gone….the beautiful Belmont Theatre was demolished in the 70s, (I remember driving by with my dad on the way to Norms in Hollywood), as was the most beautiful high school in Los Angeles, Belmont, razed in the late 60s/early 70s. L.A. Smith, the architect, also designed the Rialto, in my town, South Pasadena, and the Highland Theatre in Highland Park.
Sorry…it’s a red brick building with a white brick facade that is on the corner. I guess the Ritz would have been between that and Gus’s B-B-Q. I just came back from driving through Washington, Oregon, and Central California, and I took several pics of defunct theatres in mostly small towns, many in seedy and run-down areas.One town with two paticulary nice theatres was Lindsay, California. Every town in central CA has at least one theatre. Many have been turned into churches, storage areas or are just boarded up. In some cities, like Porterville, yuppies have moved in and are restoring the historic areas. In others, judging by the architecture and degree of decrepitude, they were probably by-passed by the railroad in the 20s and the theatres have been boarded-up since the 50s, just waiting for a rebirth at the hands of a dreamer, perhaps even someone who visits Cinema Treasures. You know,having spent years driving through California and the west I can say that without a doubt , there is no ugly or boring or uninspiring place around here.
Yeah, I was thinking of the building on the corner. The parking lot is there, where the Ritz used to be.
There is a big red brick building there now, I believe it houses office space and a Papa John’s Pizza on the first floor.Is this building part of the old theatre, or is this a newer retro type building?
Hello again. About a year ago, and about 5 years after the baseball glove incident…my son and his crew of pals were walking around South Pasadena one weekend night. Before taking off for the night, I gave each of his pals, my son included, a flashlight. To my son I loaned by big black Mag-Lite, with the admonition that he should bring it back or else. When they got to the Rialto, the y noticed that the side stairway door was ajar, this being 1 hour after the midnight movie had ended. My son’s crew wanted to go exploring, but my son had recently been pinched for filming high school grudge fights, and his girlfriend, whom he had come across that evening,
disuaded from doing so. One friend had damaged his flashlite, so my son loaned him the Mag-Lite. My son went home soon after, but his friends went exploring. They were promptly caught by the night-watchmen, and the South Pasadena Police, arrested them whole bunch. I was called to pick-up some of the kids from the jail. The watchmen was there making a statement. He told me that he probably wouldnt have called the cops except that every night for the past week those kids were breaking in and mocking him by playing catch in the balcony. I told him that wasnt possible since the kids had snuk in only that one night .The od man says'“Baloney!!! Every night they’re up there running around, saying stuff like,"Watch a movie after the game”, and “slide home junior”!!! And the cops kept my Mag-Lite.
Hello again,I know for a fact that the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles is haunted. As for the Rialto, let me relate this story concerning my son.The Rialto has two side stairways on the south side of the theatre( Oxley Street). One is a stage access/fire escape, the other, boarded up, was an old access to the space behind the balcony, and once open to the office space on the second floor. This stairway has been boarded-up since the 60s, but one night my son was coming from a party in the Marengo district, and he saw the boarded-up entrance ,ajar. It had beeen raining very hard,( most of the damage in the Rialto is water damage) and the wooden doors had become warped.My son, being an urban explorer like his ol' man, pried the door open enough so he could crawl through. He always carries his little Mag-Lite, so he went exploring this section of the Rialto. There were several holes in the plaster on the second floor, and feeling behind one of the holes, he found and brought up what we later found out to be a game-used 1919 baseball glove. He pounded the glove for a while, thinking it odd that such a thing would be inside a plaster wall, then he sat down in the balcony to rest. After a while, he felt as if were being watched, he felt wind on his back, and then a sound of something sticky peeling off a surface. The hair on the back of his neck stood up and he says he heard “whispers”, one of which he could make out was saying, “Watch the movie after the game”.When looked down at the bottom, near the thr right of the stage, he saw a dark figure , human glide down off the stage and silently make its way acroos the second row of seats. My son was terrified, but transfixed by this strange sight. the dark figure then made its way toward the lobby, and my son says he heard another whisper that said,“ "steal home, get out boy, get out boy..”, so he bolted down the stairs and ran back home. We still have that glove.
Hello, I have lived in South Pasadena since 1984.Around the middle 80s, the Rialto allowed live rock concerts by local San Gabriel Valley rock bands on the weekend nights. I have heard it rumoured that Armored Saint had played a gig there before they became famous. When I first moved there, I heard the bands plying, and I walked in. I had my harmonica so I jammed briefly with one of the bands. I heard that two weeks later some San Marino High School toughs tried to crash the concert and in the ensuing brawl, the very expensive,rare, and original glass doors were broken and THAT was the end of the gigs.I was surprised, because other than this
incident, South Pasadena teens are well behaved.
Say, the script that I found had extensive notes on the last three pages which are signed , “Mack” or “Mick”, and some more writing on the back page signed “Harry Edwards” and someone named “Edendale” or “Edindele”. I wonder if this had anyhting to do with United Artists.
Dudes, that young thing was Gene Scotts wife??? Holy crap, I thought it was his daughter!!! Man, she has a really terrible singing voice! Yikes! You’d think the church would hire someone to punch up her vocals, or least equalize it or add some reverb or something. Man…its painful to watch.
We also used to project movies on to walls of the surrounding buildings with one of our 16mm projectors. That was a gas, watching movies on the 12th floor wall across the parking lot. Has anyone seen the gargoyles on the building?? Many of them are movie oriented. There are several characters from drama and literature, Dickens, I believe, and several gargoyles are seen cranking the old style box movie cameras. Everyone that came to visit me was reaaly blown away by those details. Right before Gene Scot came on the scene, several of the business owners( most of them were garment industry cutters , fashion designers, filmmakers and artists), banded together and tried to obtain the masterlease, myself included,but to no avail, it was a done deal. Religion trumps creativity and art once again. Too bad. I had envisioned a colony of filmmakers and animators there.I think Charlie, Douglas and Mary would have liked that.
Needleman Enterprises owned the masterlease but relinquished it in 1999 for private reasons( I suppose because they also owned the California and Orpheum theatres, along with several other properties downtown). Metropolitan then sold the masterlease out to Gene Scott, who then propmtly evicted a few hundred business owners to make way for his church. I myself had an animation studio on the 12th floor, and during my time there I explored the building and theatre top to bottom with friends and fellow animators. I even lurked about inside the hollow tower. Once , when they tore down a wall on the tenth floor to upgrade the electricals, I fished around inside several feet of wall and pulled out a full unopened can of MJB coffee, several newspapers from 1927, a brass plumbob, a can of Hills Brothers coffee filled with buffalo nickels, a book of matches, and a partial script for a movie, and five brand-new old baseball gloves still in their original boxes, one of them with a cool black and white photo pasted on the box of someone named Mordecai Brown and another with a guy named Frank Baker. One of the old-timers that had been there since the 1930s told me that there had been a sporting goods company on the 11th floor. One of my other neighbors there also told me that one of the workmen fished out three circa 1920 brass flashlights from a 9th floor wall. I really missed that place, I had great views of the Eastern building and old downtown on one side, and from my side window I could see the new skyscraper skyline. I dont know if Metropolitan sold out to Scott or what.
Does anyone know what happened to the ticket box? It was completely covered with Batchelder tiles, with two tile parrots on either side and aluminum frames and detailing for the windows and molding.
I had hired two fellows to help me take it when they were demolishing the building, but someone swiped it during the night/early morning. Cleveland Wrecking and the L.A. theatre Conservancy , who were also after it , also dont know what happened to it. I have a feeling it wound up in some west-side backyard.