Musart Theatre

Joe Vogel on December 4, 2021 at 11:30 pm

This house has been extensively researched by Bill Counter and has this page at his web site. Under the name Little Theatre it was used as a movie house in the summer of 1914, and perhaps for a short time thereafter, but for the remainder of its history it was a legitimate house.

The Little Theatre opened on January 26, 1913, and the building, which included studio spaces as well as the theater, was designed by Morgan, Walls & Morgan. From 1923, the house was listed as the Egan Theatre, or sometimes Egan Little Theatre. It became the Musart Theatre in 1933, and was one of the venues for the depression era WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. In 1950 it was briefly known as the Teatro Fine Arts, presenting stage productions in Spanish. That appears to have been its last use as a theater, though in the 1970s it was in use as a rehearsal hall for the original Los Angeles Ballet Company, which existed from 1974 to 1985.

The building might still have been standing in the early 1980s, and it’s possible that I was once in it, though I’m not positive. I visited an art gallery on an upper floor of a building in this block while on a downtown gallery tour in 1984. It was an interesting old building, and I planned to go back and take a closer look at it sometime but never got around to it before I left Los Angeles. I wish now that I’d paid closer attention to it when I was there. The entire block has since been demolished.