Hub Theatre

The Hub Theatre was located at 1007 S. Central Ave.

Located only a mile or so east of the lower end of the downtown theater district, the Hub would have been part of a very different, but still lively neighborhood. Transformed from an area of small farms, orchards and vineyards late in the 19th century, by 1920 the several hundred acres east of downtown had become a thriving and diverse area of small shops, factories, warehouses, hotels, wholesale markets, apartments, Victorian dwellings, churches, schools, and all the amenities of an early 20th century city neighborhood. The address of this theatre places it a block south of the Pacific Electric Interurban line which ran to Watts, Huntington Park, Long Beach, and Orange County, where it ran along Ninth Street. Local Streetcar service was also present in the area, provided by the L.A. Railway. The Hub was located less than half a mile south of what, before the construction of Union Station, was the main depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

With the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union, some parts of this extensive collection of small neighborhoods, so conveniently situated near the railroad yards at which the passenger cars were maintained and serviced, became the place where many of the union’s prosperous members chose to establish their homes. They were the kings of the city’s still fairly small Black community, and this stretch of Central Avenue became the community’s first main street.

Some of my older relatives have told me of passing though this neighborhood in the 1920s, during its most prosperous years, before the depression. It was a very lively place. No air of its faded glamour still clung to it in the late 1950s, when I first saw it. The liveliest part of Central Avenue had by then shifted far to the south, below Adams Boulevard. Most of the houses along the once tree-shaded streets had by then been displaced by the expanding industrial district, but a scattered few still stood, and the shops and restaurants of the area catered mostly to the stream of daily workers from other neighborhoods who filled the factories, and they closed early unless they were very close to one of the wholesale markets which were busy all night.

I would like to have seen the place in earlier times, when the Hub’s marquee must have shone brightly above the passing throngs of Friday and Saturday night revelers, and its seats filled with moviegoers. Not only has this theatre vanished, but the entire neighborhood of which it was a part has gone, too.

Just a parking lot today. No trace of the theater.