The Linda Lea was opened as the Arrow Theater, at 251 S. Main Street. The architect was John Kunst, and the original owner was a Mr. George Carpenter. The plans were for a theater to seat 500 people, and two stores. This information is from the announcement of the completion of the plans in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 9/19/1924. The listing of the contracts for construction were published in SB&C issue of 10/17/1924.
This theater was listed for the first time in the Los Angeles City Directory of 1926, at 6107 S. Main Street. The Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 5/23/1924 makes this announcement about it: “Lawrence McConville… has completed plans and has the contract to construct a store and theater building at the corner of 61st and Main streets for J.A. Piuma; it will have seating for 800 people and there will be 2 stores… cost $35,000.”
The lively entertainment district which once thrived on Central Avenue was entirely gone by the 1970s. The neighborhood had grown very poor by then, and had been deserted even by the chain drug stores and markets. A few historic buildings remained, but the place was dispirited and dangerous. It’s probably best that you didn’t go exploring there at that time.
I know that some Los Angeles area neighborhood movie houses did close down for a while during the depression years, and were then re-opened as the economy recovered in the early 1940s, often renovated and given new names. It seems likely enough that the Circle was among them. (But then, so might the Aloha. Is it certain that it was built in the 1940s, or could it have been an older theater operated earlier under another name?) But it does look as though the Century is a more likely candidate for being the theater designed by Smith. Yet, that 1925 opening date for the Circle-without-address seems a bit late for a theater designed in 1921. It usually took less than a year to build and open a small neighborhood theater in those days.
(I don’t know why I appended “Fox” to West Coast in that first comment- it was still just West Coast in those days.)
Something that annoys me no end is the knowledge that, until I was about five or six years old, we frequently drove along that stretch of Broadway while on the way to visit various relatives who lived in the southern section of the city. Then we began using the new Harbor Freeway, and seldom traveled Broadway again. If that freeway had opened a few years later, I’d probably have a clear memory of the neighborhood with which I could connect some of these theater locations.
I notice that, directly under their listing of the Casino, the have a theater called the “Cirole.” I wonder if that could be a misspelling of “Circle?” There was definitely a Circle Theater in Los Angeles in that era, also designed by Smith, located at 60th and Moneta Avenue (later renamed South Broadway.)
And, on the subject of coincidence, before I got your reply here, I had minutes before made a comment about the Circle on the Cinema Treasures entry for the Aloha Theater, at 60th and Broadway, which may in fact have been the Circle.
As for the address coincidence on Central Avenue, many of the neighborhood theaters built in Los Angeles in that era were of a fairly standard form, with a couple of shops either side of the lobby entrance, and sometimes a door to an upper floor of offices or apartments. A great many theaters built at intersections thus had addresses ending in a number in the teens, so the odds of two theaters a block apart on the same side of a street having a number ending in 19 were probably one in five.
I came across a photograph, in the Los Angeles Public Library photo database, of a Palms Theater in Palms, California, c1928. It is possible that this theater dates from that era. The neighborhood is quite old. My grandfather was a plastering contractor in the 1920s, and many of his jobs were in the Palms-Cheviot Hills area. It was pretty fully built up there before 1930, and could easily have supported a movie house of its own in the prosperous years before the depression, even with other theaters nearby.
Here’s an interesting puzzle. In the issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor for 7/29/1921 there is a notice that L.A. Smith designed a theater to be built for Fox West Coast at 60th and Moneta Avenue (the former name of South Broadway.) The theater was named the Circle. It is described as a one story brick building, containing six shops and a theater to seat 900.
The question is, does this article refer to the Aloha, at 6010 Broadway, or to the now-demolished Century, across the street at 6013? If there were no theaters on the northern corners of that intersection, though, one or the other of these two had to be the work of L.A. Smith. Perhaps a reference can be found to one or the other under the earlier name, maybe in a Fox West Coast theater listing or some such.
In the L.A. Library’s online California Index, I have come across many references to theaters designed by L.A. Smith in the early-mid 1920s, but the index doesn’t always reveal their later names, and usually doesn’t give the exact street address. I’ve been trying to match them up with theaters listed here, and have succeeded with a few, but there are more that I haven’t been able to connect. I think that some of them aren’t listed here at all, especially those on the south side of town. I wish I could get ahold of the periodicals from which the information was taken themselves, instead of just these scans of library index cards.
But Smith was a remarkably prolific architect in those years. I have seen references to at least two dozen theaters he designed between 1920 and 1926. Significantly, there is a reference to a theater at 43rd and Central which he designed , originally called the Casino, owned by an investor named J.V. Akey, and leased to West Coast Theaters. (This information all comes from the June 17th, 1921 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor.) This has made me wonder if perhaps that is not a typo in the Film Daily Yearbooks from the 1950’s. It seems possible that whoever operated the Tivoli under the name Bill Robinson might have switched theaters, moving one block south sometime in the 1940s, and taken the name with them.
I remember the Bill Robinson being listed in the L.A. Times movie section well into the 1950s, at least, but unfortunately I was only ever familiar with the section of Central Avenue north of Washington Boulevard, so I have no memory of ever having seen this theater or others nearby, which were a mile or so south of Washington.
I remember that, in the early 1960s, this theater was quite well known for its ongoing concert series, Jazz at The Metro. I heard it mentioned on the local jazz radio station at the time, which I think was KBFK-FM, and it was frequently plugged in the entertainment section of The Los Angeles Times. I always intended to check it out, but never got around to it.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 3/15/1937 says that architect Clifford A. Balch had prepeared the plans for remodeling an existing building at 417-419 N. Fairfax for use as a movie theatre.
Southwest builder and contractor of 2/13/1925 says that Richard D. King was the architect for the Ravenna Theatre, and that it was being built for Chotiner Theaters.
I have found an additional reference to the Scenic Theater. Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 7/18/1919 says that architects A.R. Walker and P.A. Eisen had prepared the plans for the theater.
One night, sometime around 1963, I accompanied two adventurous friends to the Regent Theatre. It was a grind house, serving mostly as a place for drunks to get off the street, but one of the features on their triple bill that night was a very bad (as it turned out) movie of Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans” with George Peppard. The movie had flashed through the regular theaters so fast that we had missed it, and we wanted to see it badly enough to brave a skid row grind house.
My chief memory of the place is of worn floors, peeling paint, broken seats, a barrel-vaulted ceiling of astonishing dirtiness, loud sound and surprisingly bright light from bare bulbs (both of these features apparently intended to keep the drunks from getting too comfortable), and several patrons who talked to themselves. Oh, yeah- and the smell. I mean The SMELL! The theater was in bad, bad shape.
The saddest thing, though, was that the movie was even worse than the theater. What a stinker! But what the hell. I think it only cost us fifty cents each, and we got to say that we’d been to a movie on skid row. The Regent was the only Main Street movie house I’ve ever been in, and I cherish the memory. Thanks, Regent, and so long.
This theater has had four names: The Morosco, The President (in the 1930s), The Newsreel (in the 1940s, before that name was transfered to the Tower Theatre) and The Globe.
I have found that the Majestic opened on November 23rd, 1908. It was owned by M.A. Hamburger, owner of Hamburger’s Department Store, which was located just up the block at the corner of 8th and Broadway. The store later became the May Company.
Thomas Tally’s first Broadway Theater was located on the same block as the Majestic.
I saw English language movies at the State many times in the early-mid 1960s. At that time, the only big downtown theaters regularly showing movies in Spanish were the Million Dollar, United Artists and California. Even most of the small theaters on Broadway were still showing movies in English.
My copy of the Los Angeles Times movie listings of February 10th, 1971, shows English language movies playing at the following Broadway theaters: Cameo, Roxie, Tower, Arcade, Los Angeles, Palace, and State, plus the Warrens (Warner Downtown) on Hill Street and the Olympic on 8th Street. With the exceptions of the Cameo, Arcade and Roxie, all these theaters were showing new or recent mainstream Hollywood films. Spanish language movies were being shown at these theaters: Astro, Broadway, Globe, Orpheum (American movies dubbed into Spanish) Rialto and United Artists. The Million Dollar had a “Call theatre for program” notice, but the movie was undoubtedly in Spanish, that theater having shown no English language movies at all since at least 1960.
A copy of the Los Angeles Times Calendar section has listings for only eight Broadway theaters, and none on any other downtown street. Of those eight, the Million Dollar was showing movies in Spanish, the Orpheum was showing a double feature of recent American releases dubbed into Spanish, the Rialto, State, Tower, Los Angeles and Palace were all showing triple features of action or horror movies in English, and the Cameo was showing four features of the same sort of fare, in English. Apparently, the market downtown for movies in Spanish had just about collapsed by that time.
But the Corwins maintained a first-run or second-run policy at most of the surviving big theaters on Broadway and at the Warrens as well, clear through the 1960s. The Globe began showing Spanish language movies before the end of the decade, and the Palace did for a while, but then returned to second-run Hollywood films. The Orpheum began running mostly American movies dubbed into Spanish (or sometimes subtitled in Spanish) about the middle of the decade, and kept that policy pretty much until it closed. Interestingly enough, in the early 1980s, the Palace went back to a first run policy for a while, but ended it after a Laemmle fourplex opened on Figuroa Street near the Bonaventure Hotel.
But I do remember the Broadway theatres of the 1960s as mostly still being fairly popular, well-maintained houses showing first run American movies. The serious decline in their fortunes didn’t set in until the 1970s.
Actually, the Miracle Mile, (thus named in the 1920s by its developer, A.W. Ross), extends from Sycamore Street (one block east of La Brea) westward to Fairfax Avenue, so the Four Star is virtually at its doorstep. See a brief description of the area in The Larchmont Chronicle.
I never attended the Four Star, but I have a good idea of what it was like, as I went to several movies at the almost identical U.A. Pasadena. It was a nice building, but leg room was minimal, so closely packed were the seats.
If this theater was owned by Thomas Tally, then it was the second of his movie houses of that name (which I suppose accounts for it being called Tally’s “New” Broadway.) A Los Angeles Times article of 12/28/1909 announced that Tally had leased a site for a theater on Broadway near 9th Street. A Times article of 7/7/1929 is headlined “Old Broadway landmark passes into history” and announces the demolition of Tally’s Broadway to make room for an expansion of the May Company department store. The old May Company building (originally called Hamburger’s Department Store) still extends a bit more than halfway down the block from 8th Street, so Tally’s original Broadway must have been a couple of doors north of the old Majestic Theater.
Incidentally, Mr. Hamburger owned the Majestic himself, and was a member of the investment group which financed the construction of the new theater (across Broadway from the Majestic) which became the 4th Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles.
According to cards in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index (search terms=“theater” “ Whittier” and “Scenic”), The Roxy is indeed the former Scenic Theater, though the Index misspells the name as “Roxie.”
Plans for the Scenic were announced in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 8/19/1919. A later issue of the same publication (3/27/1925) names the owners as Whittier Amusement Company, 211 Philadelphia Street, and reports that the theater would be remodeled and redecorated, and that a new organ would be installed by the Moller Company.
The theater was still called the Scenic as late as 1932, when the 11/5/1932 issue of Motion Picture Herald announced that a Mr. Reno Wilk had been named as its manager.
The Roxy was destroyed by an arson fire in late September, 1971, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times of October 1st that year.
L.A. Smith was probably the architect of this theater. I have found two references to it in the Southwest Builder and Contractor, issues of ¾/1921 and 4/22/1921. Both give the location of the planned theater, designed by Smith, as on Western Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets, though the exact address is not given. The project is described as a two story brick building, 110 by 150 feet, with theater and two shops on the ground floor, and three offices on a small second floor.
I remember seeing the Embassy while passing by, many years ago, but can’t remember if it fits that description. If it did, and was the only theater on that block, then it probably is Smith’s work.
The architect of this theater is named as Arthur W. Hawes, and the owner as Frances S. Fonda, in a notice about its planned construction published in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of April 12, 1940. The place must not have opened until 1941, or very late 1940.
(Yes, eadkins, Frances Fonda was Mrs. Henry Fonda, Jane’s mother.)
And, like Moviemanforever, I saw “Five Easy Pieces” at this theater- though it wasn’t on the night when they did the preview of “The Owl and The Pussycat.”
The Linda Lea was opened as the Arrow Theater, at 251 S. Main Street. The architect was John Kunst, and the original owner was a Mr. George Carpenter. The plans were for a theater to seat 500 people, and two stores. This information is from the announcement of the completion of the plans in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 9/19/1924. The listing of the contracts for construction were published in SB&C issue of 10/17/1924.
This theater was listed for the first time in the Los Angeles City Directory of 1926, at 6107 S. Main Street. The Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 5/23/1924 makes this announcement about it: “Lawrence McConville… has completed plans and has the contract to construct a store and theater building at the corner of 61st and Main streets for J.A. Piuma; it will have seating for 800 people and there will be 2 stores… cost $35,000.”
The lively entertainment district which once thrived on Central Avenue was entirely gone by the 1970s. The neighborhood had grown very poor by then, and had been deserted even by the chain drug stores and markets. A few historic buildings remained, but the place was dispirited and dangerous. It’s probably best that you didn’t go exploring there at that time.
I know that some Los Angeles area neighborhood movie houses did close down for a while during the depression years, and were then re-opened as the economy recovered in the early 1940s, often renovated and given new names. It seems likely enough that the Circle was among them. (But then, so might the Aloha. Is it certain that it was built in the 1940s, or could it have been an older theater operated earlier under another name?) But it does look as though the Century is a more likely candidate for being the theater designed by Smith. Yet, that 1925 opening date for the Circle-without-address seems a bit late for a theater designed in 1921. It usually took less than a year to build and open a small neighborhood theater in those days.
(I don’t know why I appended “Fox” to West Coast in that first comment- it was still just West Coast in those days.)
Something that annoys me no end is the knowledge that, until I was about five or six years old, we frequently drove along that stretch of Broadway while on the way to visit various relatives who lived in the southern section of the city. Then we began using the new Harbor Freeway, and seldom traveled Broadway again. If that freeway had opened a few years later, I’d probably have a clear memory of the neighborhood with which I could connect some of these theater locations.
I notice that, directly under their listing of the Casino, the have a theater called the “Cirole.” I wonder if that could be a misspelling of “Circle?” There was definitely a Circle Theater in Los Angeles in that era, also designed by Smith, located at 60th and Moneta Avenue (later renamed South Broadway.)
And, on the subject of coincidence, before I got your reply here, I had minutes before made a comment about the Circle on the Cinema Treasures entry for the Aloha Theater, at 60th and Broadway, which may in fact have been the Circle.
As for the address coincidence on Central Avenue, many of the neighborhood theaters built in Los Angeles in that era were of a fairly standard form, with a couple of shops either side of the lobby entrance, and sometimes a door to an upper floor of offices or apartments. A great many theaters built at intersections thus had addresses ending in a number in the teens, so the odds of two theaters a block apart on the same side of a street having a number ending in 19 were probably one in five.
I came across a photograph, in the Los Angeles Public Library photo database, of a Palms Theater in Palms, California, c1928. It is possible that this theater dates from that era. The neighborhood is quite old. My grandfather was a plastering contractor in the 1920s, and many of his jobs were in the Palms-Cheviot Hills area. It was pretty fully built up there before 1930, and could easily have supported a movie house of its own in the prosperous years before the depression, even with other theaters nearby.
Here’s an interesting puzzle. In the issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor for 7/29/1921 there is a notice that L.A. Smith designed a theater to be built for Fox West Coast at 60th and Moneta Avenue (the former name of South Broadway.) The theater was named the Circle. It is described as a one story brick building, containing six shops and a theater to seat 900.
The question is, does this article refer to the Aloha, at 6010 Broadway, or to the now-demolished Century, across the street at 6013? If there were no theaters on the northern corners of that intersection, though, one or the other of these two had to be the work of L.A. Smith. Perhaps a reference can be found to one or the other under the earlier name, maybe in a Fox West Coast theater listing or some such.
In the L.A. Library’s online California Index, I have come across many references to theaters designed by L.A. Smith in the early-mid 1920s, but the index doesn’t always reveal their later names, and usually doesn’t give the exact street address. I’ve been trying to match them up with theaters listed here, and have succeeded with a few, but there are more that I haven’t been able to connect. I think that some of them aren’t listed here at all, especially those on the south side of town. I wish I could get ahold of the periodicals from which the information was taken themselves, instead of just these scans of library index cards.
But Smith was a remarkably prolific architect in those years. I have seen references to at least two dozen theaters he designed between 1920 and 1926. Significantly, there is a reference to a theater at 43rd and Central which he designed , originally called the Casino, owned by an investor named J.V. Akey, and leased to West Coast Theaters. (This information all comes from the June 17th, 1921 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor.) This has made me wonder if perhaps that is not a typo in the Film Daily Yearbooks from the 1950’s. It seems possible that whoever operated the Tivoli under the name Bill Robinson might have switched theaters, moving one block south sometime in the 1940s, and taken the name with them.
I remember the Bill Robinson being listed in the L.A. Times movie section well into the 1950s, at least, but unfortunately I was only ever familiar with the section of Central Avenue north of Washington Boulevard, so I have no memory of ever having seen this theater or others nearby, which were a mile or so south of Washington.
I remember that, in the early 1960s, this theater was quite well known for its ongoing concert series, Jazz at The Metro. I heard it mentioned on the local jazz radio station at the time, which I think was KBFK-FM, and it was frequently plugged in the entertainment section of The Los Angeles Times. I always intended to check it out, but never got around to it.
This theater was earlier known as the La Mirada.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 3/15/1937 says that architect Clifford A. Balch had prepeared the plans for remodeling an existing building at 417-419 N. Fairfax for use as a movie theatre.
The Madrid opened in October, 1926. That’s all I’ve been able to find out about it so far.
Southwest builder and contractor of 2/13/1925 says that Richard D. King was the architect for the Ravenna Theatre, and that it was being built for Chotiner Theaters.
I have found an additional reference to the Scenic Theater. Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 7/18/1919 says that architects A.R. Walker and P.A. Eisen had prepared the plans for the theater.
The Mesa was closed in September of 1963. A fire damaged the building in April of 1964, and it was demolished in 1965.
One night, sometime around 1963, I accompanied two adventurous friends to the Regent Theatre. It was a grind house, serving mostly as a place for drunks to get off the street, but one of the features on their triple bill that night was a very bad (as it turned out) movie of Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans” with George Peppard. The movie had flashed through the regular theaters so fast that we had missed it, and we wanted to see it badly enough to brave a skid row grind house.
My chief memory of the place is of worn floors, peeling paint, broken seats, a barrel-vaulted ceiling of astonishing dirtiness, loud sound and surprisingly bright light from bare bulbs (both of these features apparently intended to keep the drunks from getting too comfortable), and several patrons who talked to themselves. Oh, yeah- and the smell. I mean The SMELL! The theater was in bad, bad shape.
The saddest thing, though, was that the movie was even worse than the theater. What a stinker! But what the hell. I think it only cost us fifty cents each, and we got to say that we’d been to a movie on skid row. The Regent was the only Main Street movie house I’ve ever been in, and I cherish the memory. Thanks, Regent, and so long.
This theater has had four names: The Morosco, The President (in the 1930s), The Newsreel (in the 1940s, before that name was transfered to the Tower Theatre) and The Globe.
I have found that the Majestic opened on November 23rd, 1908. It was owned by M.A. Hamburger, owner of Hamburger’s Department Store, which was located just up the block at the corner of 8th and Broadway. The store later became the May Company.
Thomas Tally’s first Broadway Theater was located on the same block as the Majestic.
I saw English language movies at the State many times in the early-mid 1960s. At that time, the only big downtown theaters regularly showing movies in Spanish were the Million Dollar, United Artists and California. Even most of the small theaters on Broadway were still showing movies in English.
My copy of the Los Angeles Times movie listings of February 10th, 1971, shows English language movies playing at the following Broadway theaters: Cameo, Roxie, Tower, Arcade, Los Angeles, Palace, and State, plus the Warrens (Warner Downtown) on Hill Street and the Olympic on 8th Street. With the exceptions of the Cameo, Arcade and Roxie, all these theaters were showing new or recent mainstream Hollywood films. Spanish language movies were being shown at these theaters: Astro, Broadway, Globe, Orpheum (American movies dubbed into Spanish) Rialto and United Artists. The Million Dollar had a “Call theatre for program” notice, but the movie was undoubtedly in Spanish, that theater having shown no English language movies at all since at least 1960.
A copy of the Los Angeles Times Calendar section has listings for only eight Broadway theaters, and none on any other downtown street. Of those eight, the Million Dollar was showing movies in Spanish, the Orpheum was showing a double feature of recent American releases dubbed into Spanish, the Rialto, State, Tower, Los Angeles and Palace were all showing triple features of action or horror movies in English, and the Cameo was showing four features of the same sort of fare, in English. Apparently, the market downtown for movies in Spanish had just about collapsed by that time.
But the Corwins maintained a first-run or second-run policy at most of the surviving big theaters on Broadway and at the Warrens as well, clear through the 1960s. The Globe began showing Spanish language movies before the end of the decade, and the Palace did for a while, but then returned to second-run Hollywood films. The Orpheum began running mostly American movies dubbed into Spanish (or sometimes subtitled in Spanish) about the middle of the decade, and kept that policy pretty much until it closed. Interestingly enough, in the early 1980s, the Palace went back to a first run policy for a while, but ended it after a Laemmle fourplex opened on Figuroa Street near the Bonaventure Hotel.
But I do remember the Broadway theatres of the 1960s as mostly still being fairly popular, well-maintained houses showing first run American movies. The serious decline in their fortunes didn’t set in until the 1970s.
L. Thomas:
Actually, the Miracle Mile, (thus named in the 1920s by its developer, A.W. Ross), extends from Sycamore Street (one block east of La Brea) westward to Fairfax Avenue, so the Four Star is virtually at its doorstep. See a brief description of the area in The Larchmont Chronicle.
I never attended the Four Star, but I have a good idea of what it was like, as I went to several movies at the almost identical U.A. Pasadena. It was a nice building, but leg room was minimal, so closely packed were the seats.
If this theater was owned by Thomas Tally, then it was the second of his movie houses of that name (which I suppose accounts for it being called Tally’s “New” Broadway.) A Los Angeles Times article of 12/28/1909 announced that Tally had leased a site for a theater on Broadway near 9th Street. A Times article of 7/7/1929 is headlined “Old Broadway landmark passes into history” and announces the demolition of Tally’s Broadway to make room for an expansion of the May Company department store. The old May Company building (originally called Hamburger’s Department Store) still extends a bit more than halfway down the block from 8th Street, so Tally’s original Broadway must have been a couple of doors north of the old Majestic Theater.
Incidentally, Mr. Hamburger owned the Majestic himself, and was a member of the investment group which financed the construction of the new theater (across Broadway from the Majestic) which became the 4th Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles.
Warren:
According to cards in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index (search terms=“theater” “ Whittier” and “Scenic”), The Roxy is indeed the former Scenic Theater, though the Index misspells the name as “Roxie.”
Plans for the Scenic were announced in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 8/19/1919. A later issue of the same publication (3/27/1925) names the owners as Whittier Amusement Company, 211 Philadelphia Street, and reports that the theater would be remodeled and redecorated, and that a new organ would be installed by the Moller Company.
The theater was still called the Scenic as late as 1932, when the 11/5/1932 issue of Motion Picture Herald announced that a Mr. Reno Wilk had been named as its manager.
The Roxy was destroyed by an arson fire in late September, 1971, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times of October 1st that year.
L.A. Smith was probably the architect of this theater. I have found two references to it in the Southwest Builder and Contractor, issues of ¾/1921 and 4/22/1921. Both give the location of the planned theater, designed by Smith, as on Western Avenue between 3rd and 4th streets, though the exact address is not given. The project is described as a two story brick building, 110 by 150 feet, with theater and two shops on the ground floor, and three offices on a small second floor.
I remember seeing the Embassy while passing by, many years ago, but can’t remember if it fits that description. If it did, and was the only theater on that block, then it probably is Smith’s work.
The architect of the Rivoli was L.A. Smith, according to the notice in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of 6/24/1921.
The architect of this theater is named as Arthur W. Hawes, and the owner as Frances S. Fonda, in a notice about its planned construction published in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of April 12, 1940. The place must not have opened until 1941, or very late 1940.
(Yes, eadkins, Frances Fonda was Mrs. Henry Fonda, Jane’s mother.)
And, like Moviemanforever, I saw “Five Easy Pieces” at this theater- though it wasn’t on the night when they did the preview of “The Owl and The Pussycat.”