Clune's Auditorium

This undated photo shows a different marquee:
http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics37/00068395.jpg

Here is an undated photo from the LAPL:
http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics35/00067384.jpg

Redevelopment time. LA Times reports a megacondo complex to arise out of the ashes of the Philharmonic. As the downtown condo market is reaching saturation point, someone is missing the boat by proposing this 800 foot tall residential tower. My bet is that it won’t ever see the light of day.

There is finally some movement on a potential building for the parking lot that’s occupied this site since the mid-80’s: a 70-story (or taller) hotel/condominium project.

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After this theater was turned into a parking lot, a law was passed that if a building was torn down it had to be replaced with another building and not just a flat parking lot. At least that is what I was told on a LA Conservancy walking tour.

Just viewed the Dec. 26th photo with glorious ceiling and couldn’t believe that this theatre/former church was TORN DOWN! Such a shame!

I posted some interior photos last November, from the LAPL.

This December 1984 photo probably was close to the demolition date:
http://tinyurl.com/k4d9h

Here is a 1905 picture:
http://tinyurl.com/hfdjv

Ken: The first of those three photos certainly dates from the period just after the old State Normal School was demolished and just before the library was built. Fifth Street has not yet been connected between Grand and Flower. It looks as though it was under construction at the time the picture was taken. You can see that the hillside that later became the location of the big concrete wall has been partly graded.

Temple Baptist Church still owned the building at the time the second photo was taken, so they must have approved of the big Alka-Seltzer sign on the roof. It was the Philharmonic that was the tenant in the building.

Though it doesn’t look like it today, when Pershing Square was rebuilt following the construction of the underground garage the landscaping was quite pleasant. The large grassy section in the center featuring two fountains was off limits to the public, but the perimeter of the park featured both an inner and an outer walkway. The outer walkway was lined with planters whose walls were of a good height for sitting, and the inner walkway was lined with benches overlooking the central lawn, some of the bearing the quaint sign “Reserved for Ladies”. The place was busy all the time and, though many of the park’s regular denizens were of sorts thought by suburbanites to be unsavory, I was there many times and never felt in the least bit threatened by any of them (though I did frequently get panhandled and asked if I’d found Jesus yet.)

The planting was mostly tropical, with palms, banana trees and ferns, and the whole perimeter was quite lush and well shaded. This tropical landscape was lost to a bland renovation in the mid-1960s which was instigated by the administration of Mayor Sam Yorty, a resident of the San Fernando Valley who disliked the liveliness of downtown and did his best to destroy as many of its amenities as possible.

Here is the Pershing Square carnage that I mentioned above:
http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics03/00011017.jpg

Here is an interesting aerial photo which includes the auditorium. The picture is undated, but it doesn’t look like the LA Library was built yet, dating it before 1926. I could be wrong but it looks like more cars are parked on the library space. That may actually be landscaping at the edge of the building.

You can see that the layout of Pershing Square was more attractive before they lopped off sections to put in underground parking in the 1950s:
http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics03/00011009.jpg

I don’t think people realize the loss to a city when something like this theater is torn down, with nothing to replace it. Why do we have to look at a multi-acre parking lot for the next thirty years due to someone else’s shortsightedness? Another example is Coulter’s Department Store on Wilshire Boulevard, which was torn down in 1980 and remains a large hole in the ground as of today. Very sad.