Perhaps someone who remembers the Fox Figueroa can clear up something for me. I have only one vivid memory of this theatre, but it is from very early, when I was no more then six or seven years old, and I’m not sure it is accurate. I remember that we were driving along one or the other of the streets on which the Figueroa was located, on a Saturday afternoon, and I saw a large crowd of people waiting at the box office. The image I have in my mind is that the theatre was set back quite a way from one street, or both of them, so there was a sort of plaza at the corner of the intersection. It also seems to me that the theatre building was “L” shaped, partly enclosing this area. But maybe it was just a very wide sidewalk on that block, and a narrower sidewalk on the next block down. The pictures of the theatre that I’ve seen are all closeups, so they don’t tell me if my image of the place is accurate. Does anyone remember the way the Figueroa was situated on its corner?
As a warning to anyone who may go looking for information about the first Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, I have noticed a discrepancy in the address posted for it in different sections of the L.A. Public Library’s online data base. on many text pages in the photo database, the address is given as 125 S. Main Street, though there is at least one photograph of the Grand the accompanying text page for which identifies it as the home of the first Orpheum, and it is a certainty that the Grand was at 110 S. Main. Other sections of the database also clearly identify the Grand as the theater which the Orpheum Circuit leased for its first Los Angeles theater, and give the correct address. I have sent an e-mail to the L.A. Public Library informing them of the repeated error in their photo database, but thus far I have received no acknowledging reply, and there has been no correction made to their web site.
I checked the location with Terraserver, and found my memory of the area confirmed The site if the theater is now occupied by a large office building (probably built in the 1920s.) The server won’t recognize the address 311 S.Spring, but does fetch 315. The building occupies the entire corner of the block, all the way to 3rd Street. There are very few small buildings from before the 1920s era left on Spring Street, which was for decades the main financial district of Los Angeles, lined mainly with banks and corporate offices, and a few hotels. Most of the banks and corporate headquarters have departed these buildings, but it is still a splendid collection of mostly 1920s-1930s architecture, though much of it lies vacant.
I have searched on Terraserver for the address 5002 W.Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, and the fairly recent USGS aerial photograph of the area displayed shows a building at that address which certainly looks as though it once housed a theater. I have not been able to find what the current use of the building might be.
The Mission Theater is mentioned in the March 6th, 1913, issue of Builder and Contractor. An addition to increase seating capacity was being built at that time. 1912 would probably be the latest date at which the original part of the theater was built. But, when dealing with buildings in Santa Barbara, it’s useful to remember that much of the town was destroyed in the earthquake of 1925, and many buildings had to be entirely rebuilt, so that it’s possible that nothing remains of the original construction. Other buildings survived, but were then, or in subsequent years, extensively remodeled to conform to the Spanish-Mission style which the city officially mandated for new construction after the earthquake. Thus, part, or none of this building may date to 1912 or earlier, and the Spanish style front most likely dates to the mid-1920s or later.
A Glendale Press article of July 20th, 1923, commented on the Egyptian style decor of the Gateway Theater. It had opened on July 2nd of that year.
A Southwest Builder and Contractor article in the issue of November 17th, 1922 had announced that the one story and part two story brick building would be built by the Winter Construction Company, and that the owner of the building was F.A. Miller. The building was 80x160 feet, and would cost an estimated $55,000.
The earliest reference to a theater in Downey that I’ve found is from a November 7th, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. The theater mentioned as being then in the planning stage is not named, and neither its size nor its exact location is mentioned in my source, (which is not the magazine itself, but an index card in the L.A. Library’s online regional history database), but the plans were being dawn by architect Harry Haden Whiteley, and construction was being financed by Hogan Willeford. I believe that this was most likely the house that came to be named the Downey Theatre. Whether or not it is the same theater that later became El Teatro I don’t know.
I was thinking that if Nederlander, or anyone else, wants to mount Broadway-style shows in the theater, they would need to return the stage house to its original use. The lack of a proper stage house would probably prevent the theater from being fully usable as a performing arts center.
If the Lido does have to be removed, I do hope they document it fully first.
I am wondering what became of the Lido Theatre, designed by Cliff Balch and built into the stage house of the Fox in 1941 or 1942, as a distinct theatre with its own entrance and lobby located in former shop space. Is it still there? If it is, and the Fox is to be restored for live performances, the Lido will have to be removed. This theater is not posted on Cinema Treasures. Does anyone have a description of it?
If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.
It would not surprise me if the Mozart was closed for a while, during the depression years, and re-opened later. I do now vaguely recall having read an article sometime in the early 1960s (perhaps in the L.A. Times, or Los Angeles Magazine) which mentioned a theater on Grand Avenue called the Grand, and said that it had been for a while Downtown’s only art house, during the late 1940s- early 1950s. As the Criterion was already gone by that time, the theater mentioned was probably the Mozart.
In any case, I’m sure that the theater was gone by the early 1960s. My memory of that stretch of Grand Avenue, across the street from Robinson’s Department Store, is fairly dim, but I think that at that time the building just below the alley south of Seventh Street housed a restaurant which had been there for decades, and south of that was only a stretch of parking lots. The restaurant probably had an address of about 720, so the theater building had most likely been next door to it, or another door or two south.
No, I think that would be the theater listed on this site as the Criterion (or Fox Criterion), and which opened as the Kinema, sometime in the early 1920s. The Criterion was in the 600 block of Grand, just north of 7th Street. There are a couple of pictures of it in the L.A. Library photo database (I think the search terms with which I found them were “Theater Kinema”) The Mozart was an older theater, and smaller, I believe. In 1941, it might have been operating as the Orange Grove.
I’ve only seen the plunge and pavillion in old postcards. They were demolished long before I was born, as was (I suspect) the Santa Fe Depot- at least, the railroad quit running passenger trains to the town soon after the Pacific Electric Railway began its regular interurban trolly service to Redondo, which I think was soon after 1900. P.E. may have continued to use the depot itself, but the interurban service was discontinued well before I ever saw the place. I have no clear recollection of a three story building with a steep shingle roof at the pier- but there certainly were plenty of buildings with shingles.
The architect of the Vogue was Paul Hartman, according to the announcement (in Southwest Builder and Contractor of July 11th, 1941), that he had begun the working drawings for the theater. There were to be 900 seats, and the cost was given as $30,000. The owner was John W. Lawson, the theatre was to be leased to Grover L. Smith, and the contractor was to be John T. Bibb. The address (before construction) was given as 733 S. Brand Boulevard.
It will be a minor miracle if this theatre still exists. My memories of Redondo Beach are few, but they go back a long way. There was once a small amusement park just south of the municipal pier, but that must have been demolished at least forty years ago. In the 1960s, the area north of the pier was changed beyond recognition by the construction of the King Harbor Marina. The last time I was in Redondo, sometime in the late 1970s, urban renewal had gotten to the old center of town. The pier was still there, but most of the buildings nearby had been leveled for parking lots.
The pier itself still featured a hodgepodge of ramshackle old buildings, most of them done up in some vaguely “nautical” style, and housing an array of restaurants, fishmongers, and souvenir shops. The theatre might well have been among those buildings, but it was certainly not being used for its original purpose. I wish I’d paid closer attention to the place. John Parkinson was one of my favorite early Los Angeles architects, and I’d be very pleased if this theater survives, even if it only houses a seafood cafe.
I have found this theater listed as one of Los Angeles' principal downtown movie houses in a map book which was probably published about 1950 (the page with the copyright date is missing, but the map of downtown shows the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways still under construction, and rapid transit tracks still running along Aliso Street.) At that time, the theatre was operating under the name Grand Playhouse.
The Glendale Masonic Temple was designed by local architect Arthur George Lindley, of the firm of Lindley & Selkirk. The building was completed in 1928.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of March 1st, 1940, announced that architect C.A. Balch was preparing plans for the State Theatre, for Fox-West Coast.
The previous year, other issues of the same publication had announced plans for a theater on the same site, to have been built for John Drew, named as the operator of the Temple Theater in Glendale. This theater would have had a balcony and a total of 800 seats, but the project was never carried out. The interesting thing about these earlier announcements, though, is that they revealed that the State was built on the site of the former Belvedere Theater, which was destroyed by a fire. The fire story was covered in a Los Angeles Times article of November 21st, 1933.
I walked along this block hundreds of times in the years I lived in Los Angeles, yet cannot remember the building next to the alley. Old pictures of Seventh Street around 1920 show a two-story building with a flat-topped decorative parapet wall rising slightly higher above the center of its facade, and a small marquee-like feature over the entrance. The pictures I’ve seen don’t have enough detail to tell if this was a theater or not.
I remember most of the buildings that were still on that block as late as the 1980s, but I don’t recall if that particular location was still occupied by a two story building. If it is, then the building is most likely the same one that was there in the 1920s, and it might still show some signs of having once been a theater.
The architect of the Vermont Theater was E.J. Borgmeyer. The owner of the building was Mr. Joseph Engert. The cost of construction for the project, including two stores, five office suites, and the theater with pipe organ was set at $100,000. The brick building was 65x170 feet.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 29 July, 1921.
Construction of the Temple Theatre began in late 1921. The contractor was Al Nelson, the owner of the building was F.W. Braun. The architect was H.C. Dockbar.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 21 October, 1921.
Perhaps someone who remembers the Fox Figueroa can clear up something for me. I have only one vivid memory of this theatre, but it is from very early, when I was no more then six or seven years old, and I’m not sure it is accurate. I remember that we were driving along one or the other of the streets on which the Figueroa was located, on a Saturday afternoon, and I saw a large crowd of people waiting at the box office. The image I have in my mind is that the theatre was set back quite a way from one street, or both of them, so there was a sort of plaza at the corner of the intersection. It also seems to me that the theatre building was “L” shaped, partly enclosing this area. But maybe it was just a very wide sidewalk on that block, and a narrower sidewalk on the next block down. The pictures of the theatre that I’ve seen are all closeups, so they don’t tell me if my image of the place is accurate. Does anyone remember the way the Figueroa was situated on its corner?
As a warning to anyone who may go looking for information about the first Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, I have noticed a discrepancy in the address posted for it in different sections of the L.A. Public Library’s online data base. on many text pages in the photo database, the address is given as 125 S. Main Street, though there is at least one photograph of the Grand the accompanying text page for which identifies it as the home of the first Orpheum, and it is a certainty that the Grand was at 110 S. Main. Other sections of the database also clearly identify the Grand as the theater which the Orpheum Circuit leased for its first Los Angeles theater, and give the correct address. I have sent an e-mail to the L.A. Public Library informing them of the repeated error in their photo database, but thus far I have received no acknowledging reply, and there has been no correction made to their web site.
Bway:
I checked the location with Terraserver, and found my memory of the area confirmed The site if the theater is now occupied by a large office building (probably built in the 1920s.) The server won’t recognize the address 311 S.Spring, but does fetch 315. The building occupies the entire corner of the block, all the way to 3rd Street. There are very few small buildings from before the 1920s era left on Spring Street, which was for decades the main financial district of Los Angeles, lined mainly with banks and corporate offices, and a few hotels. Most of the banks and corporate headquarters have departed these buildings, but it is still a splendid collection of mostly 1920s-1930s architecture, though much of it lies vacant.
I have searched on Terraserver for the address 5002 W.Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, and the fairly recent USGS aerial photograph of the area displayed shows a building at that address which certainly looks as though it once housed a theater. I have not been able to find what the current use of the building might be.
The Mission Theater is mentioned in the March 6th, 1913, issue of Builder and Contractor. An addition to increase seating capacity was being built at that time. 1912 would probably be the latest date at which the original part of the theater was built. But, when dealing with buildings in Santa Barbara, it’s useful to remember that much of the town was destroyed in the earthquake of 1925, and many buildings had to be entirely rebuilt, so that it’s possible that nothing remains of the original construction. Other buildings survived, but were then, or in subsequent years, extensively remodeled to conform to the Spanish-Mission style which the city officially mandated for new construction after the earthquake. Thus, part, or none of this building may date to 1912 or earlier, and the Spanish style front most likely dates to the mid-1920s or later.
A Glendale Press article of July 20th, 1923, commented on the Egyptian style decor of the Gateway Theater. It had opened on July 2nd of that year.
A Southwest Builder and Contractor article in the issue of November 17th, 1922 had announced that the one story and part two story brick building would be built by the Winter Construction Company, and that the owner of the building was F.A. Miller. The building was 80x160 feet, and would cost an estimated $55,000.
The earliest reference to a theater in Downey that I’ve found is from a November 7th, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. The theater mentioned as being then in the planning stage is not named, and neither its size nor its exact location is mentioned in my source, (which is not the magazine itself, but an index card in the L.A. Library’s online regional history database), but the plans were being dawn by architect Harry Haden Whiteley, and construction was being financed by Hogan Willeford. I believe that this was most likely the house that came to be named the Downey Theatre. Whether or not it is the same theater that later became El Teatro I don’t know.
I was thinking that if Nederlander, or anyone else, wants to mount Broadway-style shows in the theater, they would need to return the stage house to its original use. The lack of a proper stage house would probably prevent the theater from being fully usable as a performing arts center.
If the Lido does have to be removed, I do hope they document it fully first.
I am wondering what became of the Lido Theatre, designed by Cliff Balch and built into the stage house of the Fox in 1941 or 1942, as a distinct theatre with its own entrance and lobby located in former shop space. Is it still there? If it is, and the Fox is to be restored for live performances, the Lido will have to be removed. This theater is not posted on Cinema Treasures. Does anyone have a description of it?
If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.
It would not surprise me if the Mozart was closed for a while, during the depression years, and re-opened later. I do now vaguely recall having read an article sometime in the early 1960s (perhaps in the L.A. Times, or Los Angeles Magazine) which mentioned a theater on Grand Avenue called the Grand, and said that it had been for a while Downtown’s only art house, during the late 1940s- early 1950s. As the Criterion was already gone by that time, the theater mentioned was probably the Mozart.
In any case, I’m sure that the theater was gone by the early 1960s. My memory of that stretch of Grand Avenue, across the street from Robinson’s Department Store, is fairly dim, but I think that at that time the building just below the alley south of Seventh Street housed a restaurant which had been there for decades, and south of that was only a stretch of parking lots. The restaurant probably had an address of about 720, so the theater building had most likely been next door to it, or another door or two south.
No, I think that would be the theater listed on this site as the Criterion (or Fox Criterion), and which opened as the Kinema, sometime in the early 1920s. The Criterion was in the 600 block of Grand, just north of 7th Street. There are a couple of pictures of it in the L.A. Library photo database (I think the search terms with which I found them were “Theater Kinema”) The Mozart was an older theater, and smaller, I believe. In 1941, it might have been operating as the Orange Grove.
I’ve only seen the plunge and pavillion in old postcards. They were demolished long before I was born, as was (I suspect) the Santa Fe Depot- at least, the railroad quit running passenger trains to the town soon after the Pacific Electric Railway began its regular interurban trolly service to Redondo, which I think was soon after 1900. P.E. may have continued to use the depot itself, but the interurban service was discontinued well before I ever saw the place. I have no clear recollection of a three story building with a steep shingle roof at the pier- but there certainly were plenty of buildings with shingles.
The architect of the Vogue was Paul Hartman, according to the announcement (in Southwest Builder and Contractor of July 11th, 1941), that he had begun the working drawings for the theater. There were to be 900 seats, and the cost was given as $30,000. The owner was John W. Lawson, the theatre was to be leased to Grover L. Smith, and the contractor was to be John T. Bibb. The address (before construction) was given as 733 S. Brand Boulevard.
It will be a minor miracle if this theatre still exists. My memories of Redondo Beach are few, but they go back a long way. There was once a small amusement park just south of the municipal pier, but that must have been demolished at least forty years ago. In the 1960s, the area north of the pier was changed beyond recognition by the construction of the King Harbor Marina. The last time I was in Redondo, sometime in the late 1970s, urban renewal had gotten to the old center of town. The pier was still there, but most of the buildings nearby had been leveled for parking lots.
The pier itself still featured a hodgepodge of ramshackle old buildings, most of them done up in some vaguely “nautical” style, and housing an array of restaurants, fishmongers, and souvenir shops. The theatre might well have been among those buildings, but it was certainly not being used for its original purpose. I wish I’d paid closer attention to the place. John Parkinson was one of my favorite early Los Angeles architects, and I’d be very pleased if this theater survives, even if it only houses a seafood cafe.
I have found this theater listed as one of Los Angeles' principal downtown movie houses in a map book which was probably published about 1950 (the page with the copyright date is missing, but the map of downtown shows the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways still under construction, and rapid transit tracks still running along Aliso Street.) At that time, the theatre was operating under the name Grand Playhouse.
The Glendale Masonic Temple was designed by local architect Arthur George Lindley, of the firm of Lindley & Selkirk. The building was completed in 1928.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of March 1st, 1940, announced that architect C.A. Balch was preparing plans for the State Theatre, for Fox-West Coast.
The previous year, other issues of the same publication had announced plans for a theater on the same site, to have been built for John Drew, named as the operator of the Temple Theater in Glendale. This theater would have had a balcony and a total of 800 seats, but the project was never carried out. The interesting thing about these earlier announcements, though, is that they revealed that the State was built on the site of the former Belvedere Theater, which was destroyed by a fire. The fire story was covered in a Los Angeles Times article of November 21st, 1933.
The start of construction on this theater was announced in an article in The Los Angeles Times on August 6th, 1922.
The grand opening was covered in another Times article, published on November 27th, 1923 under the headline “Playhouse elaborate in details.”
I walked along this block hundreds of times in the years I lived in Los Angeles, yet cannot remember the building next to the alley. Old pictures of Seventh Street around 1920 show a two-story building with a flat-topped decorative parapet wall rising slightly higher above the center of its facade, and a small marquee-like feature over the entrance. The pictures I’ve seen don’t have enough detail to tell if this was a theater or not.
I remember most of the buildings that were still on that block as late as the 1980s, but I don’t recall if that particular location was still occupied by a two story building. If it is, then the building is most likely the same one that was there in the 1920s, and it might still show some signs of having once been a theater.
There is now an office building on the theater’s site.
The architect of the Vermont Theater was E.J. Borgmeyer. The owner of the building was Mr. Joseph Engert. The cost of construction for the project, including two stores, five office suites, and the theater with pipe organ was set at $100,000. The brick building was 65x170 feet.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 29 July, 1921.
Construction of the Temple Theatre began in late 1921. The contractor was Al Nelson, the owner of the building was F.W. Braun. The architect was H.C. Dockbar.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 21 October, 1921.