docchapel: The theater at Slauson and Vermont must have been the Temple. This is a link to the Temple’s page. Be sure to also click on the “view all comments” link.
This link reaches the Lincoln Theatre page. It also has additional comments, plus several photos you can reach by clicking the “Photos” link in the box just above the theater photo on the main page.
There might have been two theaters called the Bill Robinson on Central Avenue. We have only one of them listed: Here is the link. It was listed at 4219 S. Central (the former Tivoli Theatre) in the Film Daily Yearbook of 1941. In 1950 the Bill Robinson was being advertised as being at 4319 S. Central (possibly the former Casino Theatre, once listed at 4317 Central) so the name might have been moved during the 1940s. We just don’t know for sure.
docchapel: Did you ever attend the Regent Theatre on Vermont near 40th Place? We have a page for it, but nobody familiar with the theater has ever shown up to comment on it, so we know next to nothing about it. It might have closed sometime in the 1950s. I don’t remember ever having seen it myself.
The 1941 description is quite different from that in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide. The larger ground floor capacity listed in the MGM report was probably achieved by removing the stage house and extending seating into the space it had occupied. The upper part of the building was probably removed at the same time, accounting for the disappearance of the gallery and the reduction of balcony seating from 402 to 120.
That amounts to an almost complete rebuilding of all but the front of the theater sometime between 1913 and 1941. It makes me wonder if maybe there was a fire or other disaster that forced the rebuilding, but I’ve been unable to find anything about such an event.
In Google’s satellite and street views it is the Broadway Federal Bank that is on the site of the Figueroa Theatre, with a large housing complex just west of it along MLK Jr. Blvd and another housing complex to the south across 40th Place.
A couple of times in the 1950s when we were on our way to visit my grandparents, who lived on 99th Street west of Normandie, we drove past the Figueroa Theatre about the time the house was opening for a Saturday or Sunday matinée, and there would be a huge crowd waiting in the line for the box office. It must have been a very popular theater in those days.
I’ve finally have discovered who was the architect of the Apollo Theatre, in this item from the August 11, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News:
“Contract Awarded.
“THEATRE AND STORE, Cost, $40,000
“HOLLYWOOD, Los Angeles Co. Cal. Hollywood Blvd. near St. Andrews Two-story brick theatre and store building, 50x174. Owner- Hollywood Theatres. Inc. Architect— C. S. Albright. 5910 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles.”
This was apparently the second building for the Apollo Theatre, which was in operation as early as 1919 either on the same site or nearby. According to a brief article in the November 8, 1919, issue of a local magazine called Holly Leaves, the Apollo, located east of St. Andrews Place, was to get a new building on the south side of the boulevard 140 feet east of Wilton Place. That project, also to have been designed by Albright, apparently fell through, as the 1920 project as built was still located east of St. Andrews Place.
C. S. Albright was probably both an architect and a builder, as I’ve found a few references to him receiving construction contracts for various projects during this period.
The 1919 article can be found at the lower left of this page at Google Books.
The July 21, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News had an item saying that the contract had been awarded for construction of a reinforced concrete theater and store building, 118x40 feet, on Main Street in Ferndale for Boyd & Pollock. The project had been designed by Eureka architect Frank T. Georgeson.
This web page at Waymarking confirms that the project was the Hart Theatre. The theater is part of the NRHP-listed Ferndale Main Street Historic District.
I’ve finally discovered what happened to the original Kinema Theatre designed by G. H. King and opened in 1913, and why it was rebuilt in 1920. Here is an item from the July 21, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News:
“FRESNO, Fresno Co., Cal.— The immediate rehabilitation of the Kinema Theatre is planned, according to Frank Purkett, Manager. The structure was recently destroyed by fire with a loss of approximately $75,000.”
The City of Chowchilla’s web site says that the Sierra Theatre was built in 1941 and demolished in the summer of 2006. It doesn’t give the year the house closed. It displays this photo.
About halfway down this web page are two photos of the Sierra from 1997. The caption says that the theater closed sometime in the mid to late 1970s.
Various newspaper and magazine items from the 1940s and 1950s name R. B. Smith as the owner and operator of the Sierra and Chowchilla Theatres. The older and smaller Chowchilla Theatre was closed in late 1953 and apparently never reopened.
This page is still missing the architects (Walker & Eisen, 1922, and alterations by H. L. Gogerty, 1924) as well as the aka’s: Empire Theatre (opening name) Mission Theatre, (by 1924) and Major Theatre (around 1929, according to Bill Counter’s page about it.) Counter also notes that in later years the house was advertised as the Fox Long Beach Theatre.
I don’t know why completion of the Empire Theatre was delayed until 1922. The July 14, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News carried this notice that the contracts for construction of the project had been let:
“Contract Awarded.
“THEATRE & OFFICE BLDG. Cost. $109,800.
“LONG BEACH, Los Angeles Co., Cal. American and Bronx [sic] Avenues. Three-story brick and steel theatre and office building, 50x250. Owner — Lineberger, Hite & Lineberger. Architects — Walker & Eisen, 1402 Hibernian Bldg., Los Angeles. Contractor — Christ Thoren, 1131 Fuller Ave., Hollywood.”
An article about the closing and impending demolition of the Windsor Theatre appeared in the May 14, 1961, issue of the Chicago Tribune (Tribune archives.) The original Windsor opened on September 20, 1886, and later suffered two major fires. It was after the second fire that the house was rebuilt and reopened as a movie theater in 1914.
The project architects for the Regal Hacienda Crossing Cinema were Michael S. Johnstone and Chester Fong of the Charlotte, North Carolina, architectural firm Atkinson/Dyer/Watson Architects. There is a rendering of the theater, plus three small photos, in the January, 2000, issue of CMU Profiles in Architecture, the quarterly house organ of the Concrete Masonry Association of California and Nevada (PDF here.
The reconfiguration of the main auditorium of the Chinese Theatre for IMAX was designed by the Laguna Beach, California, architectural firm Blair Ballard Architects. There is one photo of the auditorium in the slide show on this page of the firm’s web site. Francis X. Bushman would barely recognize the place.
Blair Ballard Architects has reconfigured its web site and the link in my previous comment no longer works, but they still have one photo of the Galaxy Tulare at the end of the slide show on this page.
One large and three small photos of the Mountain Village Stadium 14 can be found in the January, 2001, issue of CMU Profiles in Architecture, the quarterly house organ of the Concrete Masonry Association of California and Nevada (PDF at this link.)
Thanks, Gpowers205. The Boys and Girls Club is at 6241 Skyway, and the next building south is at 6197, so the theater’s address would have been between those numbers- say approximately 6225. Google Maps' address approximation is way off, though, with readouts of 6180-6192 for the parking lot (which also serves as an extension of Fir Street between Skyway and Inez Way.)
This house might have been twinned in its later years. A “25 years ago” feature in the May 5, 2013, issue of the Sioux City Journal said that the owner of the Cameo Theaters were temporarily closed and the owner was trying to decide whether to dispose of or continue operating the house, which had suffered water damage. The headline and brief article used the plural “theaters” three times, so it wasn’t just a typo.
It’s also possible that the Cameo opened in the 1910s. A brochure for a walking tour of central downtown Sioux City says that the Cameo Theatre was in a building erected in 1901-1902 as an annex to the Martin Department Store, the main building of which was on 4th Street. The store moved to an entirely new building in 1916 and its old buildings were then converted for other uses. The brochure doesn’t say when the theater opened, only that it was in the former department store annex, so it’s possible that it was installed there in 1916, maybe originally operating under a different name.
The original 1901 facade, designed in the Beaux Arts style by architect Henry Fisher, is still largely intact, but the building doesn’t show any signs of having once housed a theater.
The first movie shown at the Fox Westwood Village when it opened on August 14, 1931, was A Free Soul, which had premiered in New York City on June 2 and opened in other cities later that month.
My apologies for my carelessness, and thanks to dallasmovietheaters for correcting my mistake. I should have noticed that 1948 was the wrong year, as kencmcintyre had already posted a link to a 1945 ad.
I’m not related to the author Joe Vogel as far as I know. It’s not an extremely common surname, but it’s not extremely rare either, so probably only a modest percentage of the Vogels in the United States would be my distant cousins. I grew up in Los Angeles, and back in the 1960s people I met who were in the movie industry sometimes asked if I was related to the Joe Vogel who was then the head of MGM, but I wasn’t.
There’s much information about the Priscilla (later Belview and then Parkview) on this web page from the Cinema Data Project. If someone wants to submit it to CT go ahead. I’m being run off my feet lately and won’t have the time.
Lewiston passed through a time warp in 1961, briefly occupying the year 19611. The good news is that they didn’t bring any future human diseases back with them, but unfortunately they did bring the computer keyboard glitches which have since plagued the world.
The August 18, 1999, issue of the Lewiston Sun Journal said that construction of the Flagship Cinemas was on schedule and the theater was expected to open in October.
An article about the demolition of the Strand Theatre in Lewiston and the possible demolition of the Auburn Theatre appeared in the February 4, 1961, issue of the Lewiston Evening Journal (Google News. A photo can be seen on this page of the same issue.) The article said that the Auburn Theatre had been closed since 1954, and was currently owned by the local municipal parking authority which intended either to convert the building to indoor parking or demolish it to make way for a conventional parking lot.
Further evidence that Fuller Claflin designed the Empire Theatre appears in the September 22, 1903, issue of the Lewiston Evening Journal. An article said that the Amalgamated Theatre Company had resumed work on the new theater on Main Street. Amalgamated was the New York design and construction firm headed by Claflin.
An article in the February 4, 1961, issue of the Evening Journal said that the Empire Theatre had opened on November 23, 1903.
docchapel: The theater at Slauson and Vermont must have been the Temple. This is a link to the Temple’s page. Be sure to also click on the “view all comments” link.
This link reaches the Lincoln Theatre page. It also has additional comments, plus several photos you can reach by clicking the “Photos” link in the box just above the theater photo on the main page.
There might have been two theaters called the Bill Robinson on Central Avenue. We have only one of them listed: Here is the link. It was listed at 4219 S. Central (the former Tivoli Theatre) in the Film Daily Yearbook of 1941. In 1950 the Bill Robinson was being advertised as being at 4319 S. Central (possibly the former Casino Theatre, once listed at 4317 Central) so the name might have been moved during the 1940s. We just don’t know for sure.
docchapel: Did you ever attend the Regent Theatre on Vermont near 40th Place? We have a page for it, but nobody familiar with the theater has ever shown up to comment on it, so we know next to nothing about it. It might have closed sometime in the 1950s. I don’t remember ever having seen it myself.
The 1941 description is quite different from that in the 1913-1914 Cahn guide. The larger ground floor capacity listed in the MGM report was probably achieved by removing the stage house and extending seating into the space it had occupied. The upper part of the building was probably removed at the same time, accounting for the disappearance of the gallery and the reduction of balcony seating from 402 to 120.
That amounts to an almost complete rebuilding of all but the front of the theater sometime between 1913 and 1941. It makes me wonder if maybe there was a fire or other disaster that forced the rebuilding, but I’ve been unable to find anything about such an event.
In Google’s satellite and street views it is the Broadway Federal Bank that is on the site of the Figueroa Theatre, with a large housing complex just west of it along MLK Jr. Blvd and another housing complex to the south across 40th Place.
A couple of times in the 1950s when we were on our way to visit my grandparents, who lived on 99th Street west of Normandie, we drove past the Figueroa Theatre about the time the house was opening for a Saturday or Sunday matinée, and there would be a huge crowd waiting in the line for the box office. It must have been a very popular theater in those days.
I’ve finally have discovered who was the architect of the Apollo Theatre, in this item from the August 11, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News:
This was apparently the second building for the Apollo Theatre, which was in operation as early as 1919 either on the same site or nearby. According to a brief article in the November 8, 1919, issue of a local magazine called Holly Leaves, the Apollo, located east of St. Andrews Place, was to get a new building on the south side of the boulevard 140 feet east of Wilton Place. That project, also to have been designed by Albright, apparently fell through, as the 1920 project as built was still located east of St. Andrews Place.C. S. Albright was probably both an architect and a builder, as I’ve found a few references to him receiving construction contracts for various projects during this period.
The 1919 article can be found at the lower left of this page at Google Books.
The July 21, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News had an item saying that the contract had been awarded for construction of a reinforced concrete theater and store building, 118x40 feet, on Main Street in Ferndale for Boyd & Pollock. The project had been designed by Eureka architect Frank T. Georgeson.
This web page at Waymarking confirms that the project was the Hart Theatre. The theater is part of the NRHP-listed Ferndale Main Street Historic District.
I’ve finally discovered what happened to the original Kinema Theatre designed by G. H. King and opened in 1913, and why it was rebuilt in 1920. Here is an item from the July 21, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News:
The City of Chowchilla’s web site says that the Sierra Theatre was built in 1941 and demolished in the summer of 2006. It doesn’t give the year the house closed. It displays this photo.
About halfway down this web page are two photos of the Sierra from 1997. The caption says that the theater closed sometime in the mid to late 1970s.
Various newspaper and magazine items from the 1940s and 1950s name R. B. Smith as the owner and operator of the Sierra and Chowchilla Theatres. The older and smaller Chowchilla Theatre was closed in late 1953 and apparently never reopened.
This page is still missing the architects (Walker & Eisen, 1922, and alterations by H. L. Gogerty, 1924) as well as the aka’s: Empire Theatre (opening name) Mission Theatre, (by 1924) and Major Theatre (around 1929, according to Bill Counter’s page about it.) Counter also notes that in later years the house was advertised as the Fox Long Beach Theatre.
I don’t know why completion of the Empire Theatre was delayed until 1922. The July 14, 1920, issue of Building & Engineering News carried this notice that the contracts for construction of the project had been let:
An article about the closing and impending demolition of the Windsor Theatre appeared in the May 14, 1961, issue of the Chicago Tribune (Tribune archives.) The original Windsor opened on September 20, 1886, and later suffered two major fires. It was after the second fire that the house was rebuilt and reopened as a movie theater in 1914.
The project architects for the Regal Hacienda Crossing Cinema were Michael S. Johnstone and Chester Fong of the Charlotte, North Carolina, architectural firm Atkinson/Dyer/Watson Architects. There is a rendering of the theater, plus three small photos, in the January, 2000, issue of CMU Profiles in Architecture, the quarterly house organ of the Concrete Masonry Association of California and Nevada (PDF here.
The reconfiguration of the main auditorium of the Chinese Theatre for IMAX was designed by the Laguna Beach, California, architectural firm Blair Ballard Architects. There is one photo of the auditorium in the slide show on this page of the firm’s web site. Francis X. Bushman would barely recognize the place.
Blair Ballard Architects has reconfigured its web site and the link in my previous comment no longer works, but they still have one photo of the Galaxy Tulare at the end of the slide show on this page.
One large and three small photos of the Mountain Village Stadium 14 can be found in the January, 2001, issue of CMU Profiles in Architecture, the quarterly house organ of the Concrete Masonry Association of California and Nevada (PDF at this link.)
Thanks, Gpowers205. The Boys and Girls Club is at 6241 Skyway, and the next building south is at 6197, so the theater’s address would have been between those numbers- say approximately 6225. Google Maps' address approximation is way off, though, with readouts of 6180-6192 for the parking lot (which also serves as an extension of Fir Street between Skyway and Inez Way.)
This house might have been twinned in its later years. A “25 years ago” feature in the May 5, 2013, issue of the Sioux City Journal said that the owner of the Cameo Theaters were temporarily closed and the owner was trying to decide whether to dispose of or continue operating the house, which had suffered water damage. The headline and brief article used the plural “theaters” three times, so it wasn’t just a typo.
It’s also possible that the Cameo opened in the 1910s. A brochure for a walking tour of central downtown Sioux City says that the Cameo Theatre was in a building erected in 1901-1902 as an annex to the Martin Department Store, the main building of which was on 4th Street. The store moved to an entirely new building in 1916 and its old buildings were then converted for other uses. The brochure doesn’t say when the theater opened, only that it was in the former department store annex, so it’s possible that it was installed there in 1916, maybe originally operating under a different name.
The original 1901 facade, designed in the Beaux Arts style by architect Henry Fisher, is still largely intact, but the building doesn’t show any signs of having once housed a theater.
The first movie shown at the Fox Westwood Village when it opened on August 14, 1931, was A Free Soul, which had premiered in New York City on June 2 and opened in other cities later that month.
My apologies for my carelessness, and thanks to dallasmovietheaters for correcting my mistake. I should have noticed that 1948 was the wrong year, as kencmcintyre had already posted a link to a 1945 ad.
I’m not related to the author Joe Vogel as far as I know. It’s not an extremely common surname, but it’s not extremely rare either, so probably only a modest percentage of the Vogels in the United States would be my distant cousins. I grew up in Los Angeles, and back in the 1960s people I met who were in the movie industry sometimes asked if I was related to the Joe Vogel who was then the head of MGM, but I wasn’t.
There’s much information about the Priscilla (later Belview and then Parkview) on this web page from the Cinema Data Project. If someone wants to submit it to CT go ahead. I’m being run off my feet lately and won’t have the time.
Lewiston passed through a time warp in 1961, briefly occupying the year 19611. The good news is that they didn’t bring any future human diseases back with them, but unfortunately they did bring the computer keyboard glitches which have since plagued the world.
The August 18, 1999, issue of the Lewiston Sun Journal said that construction of the Flagship Cinemas was on schedule and the theater was expected to open in October.
An article about the demolition of the Strand Theatre in Lewiston and the possible demolition of the Auburn Theatre appeared in the February 4, 1961, issue of the Lewiston Evening Journal (Google News. A photo can be seen on this page of the same issue.) The article said that the Auburn Theatre had been closed since 1954, and was currently owned by the local municipal parking authority which intended either to convert the building to indoor parking or demolish it to make way for a conventional parking lot.
A 1928 photo of the Auburn Theatre is here.
An article in the February 4, 19611, issue of the Lewiston Evening Journal said that the Lewiston Theatre had opened on December 30, 1914.
Further evidence that Fuller Claflin designed the Empire Theatre appears in the September 22, 1903, issue of the Lewiston Evening Journal. An article said that the Amalgamated Theatre Company had resumed work on the new theater on Main Street. Amalgamated was the New York design and construction firm headed by Claflin.
An article in the February 4, 1961, issue of the Evening Journal said that the Empire Theatre had opened on November 23, 1903.