The Hudson Plaza Cinema opened on December 22, 1967, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of January 1, 1968. It was one of five new theaters opened across the country by General Cinema on the same day.
Here’s a brief item from Boxoffice Magazine, May 28, 1962:
“Approximately $75,000 was expended to give the Cinema Theatre a complete facelift in time for the Pacific Coast premier of ‘Through a Glass Darkly.’ Remodeling included a new lobby, marquee, carpets, drapes, and an elaborate mezzanine art gallery.”
My first visit to the Cinema must have been fairly soon after this. I don’t remember ever seeing the old marquee, or being in the theatre before the art gallery (not so elaborate, really) was installed.
When the Fox Covina was multiplexed with an addition in 1972, the total seating capacity was upped from 814 to 1,316, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine, November 20, 1972.
The July 5, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that Associated Independent Theatres of the West would open the Camelback Theatre in Scottsdale that summer. The new house had 850 seats.
The January 17, 1966, issue of Boxoffice included the Camelback in its annual list of theatres opened during the previous year.
Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of September 11, 1961, published an article about three theaters being planned by Stein Enterprises, the development arm of Statewide Theatres. The Capri was one of them, and the caption of a drawing of it said it was scheduled for a September 18 groundbreaking. I can’t find any later Boxoffice articles about the Capri, but it seems likely that it opened in 1962.
Loew’s Theatres Inc.’s annual report for 1967 said that the company had acquired 30 theaters from Statewide that year, and mentioned the Capri as being among the acquisitions. See my comment of March 8, 2007, above, for later developments at the Capri.
The Eastland Center neighborhood suffered some long delays before it got its movie house. A local exhibitor named Sid Pink had plans to build a 1000 seat theater there as early as 1956, according to the April 7, 1956, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said that ground was to be broken soon for the new theater.
Then the March 3, 1958, issue of Boxoffice published a drawing of Sid Pink’s new 1,100 seat theater, with a caption saying it was “…now being built.” The announcement was a bit premature, it seems.
When construction of the Eastland Theatre really began at last, in 1961, it was a project of the Sanborn Theatres circuit. I guess everybody got tired of waiting for Sid Pink to get his show on the road.
Here is a PDF file of the Winter, 1992, issue of SoCal Cinemas' house organ, with a brief article about the 30th anniversary celebration for the Eastland Theatre, which was held on November 21 that year. It mentions that Jayne Mansfield had made a personal appearance for the Eastland’s opening night.
A Boxoffice Magazine item from the issue of September 15, 1969, confirms that the Wescove opened as a twin, on August 20, 1969. Boxoffice named the designers of the theater as the South Pasadena firm of Smith & Williams.
Whitney R. Smith and Wayne R. Williams were very well known for their midcentury modern designs, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of them designing a theater. I wonder if they did any others? It would really bite if somebody has knocked down the only Smith & Williams theater in the world for a parking lot.
The Wescove had become a triplex by August, 1986, when it was being operated by SoCal Cinemas (the Sanborn Theatres circuit’s later name.) Their listings gave the address as 1450 West Covina Parkway. The house had still been listed as a twin in the Independent Theatres listings of the L.A. Times in February, 1971.
The July 9, 1949, issue of Boxoffice magazine published an item saying that the Rio Theatre in Monte Rio had recently opened. Owners of the 500 seat independent house were S.A. Bartlett and S.A. Bartlett Jr., formerly operators of a theater in Grass Valley.
The twinning of the Bay Theatre took place in 1972. The house reopened as the Bay Twin on August 24, according to Boxoffice Magazine’s September 18 issue that year. The owners had the theater’s interior entirely stripped and rebuilt, rather than merely splitting the original 1100 seat auditorium with a wall. The new twin auditoriums each had 400 seats.
Mike L: You’ll find links to the Cinema Treasures pages for various theaters in Culver City on this page.
Neither of the new multiplexes is on the site of either the Meralta or the Culver. The Meralta’s site is now occupied by an office building, and the Culver is still operating, as a live performance venue called the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The Culver Plaza multiplex is across Culver Boulevard from it.
I’ve found a better map. It shows the streetcar lines in Los Angeles in 1906, and the area around the Pictorial is included. For anybody trying to pin down the locations of theaters when they are listed in early city directories or newspaper ads with old street names that have since been changed, this map can be very useful.
The map is called Red Cars and Yellow Cars, and is linked from this Library of Congress page. You can use the map online with a zoom feature, or download the whole thing in a 7.5MB jpeg file.
billy byron: I missed your comment earlier, as my e-mail service no longer sends me notifications for new Cinema Treasures comments.
If you get back to this page, could you please click on this link to a 1951 Life Magazine photo and tell me if the theater the photo depicts is the Mission? The Life Magazine archive says the building is in Los Angeles, but I think it must be in Ventura, or at least in Ventura County. If it isn’t the Mission, do you recognize the theater at all?
When I came across the listing of the Ivy Theatre in the 1915 city directory, I couldn’t place El Centro Avenue. It never occurred to me it would be El Centro Avenue in Hollywood, and I found it only by Googling the address. I was astonished to find that there was still a theatre in the building, and that it was a locally famous theater I’d actually seen advertised in the L.A. Times for years (though I’ve never been to a play there.)
The part of Hollywood south of Santa Monica Boulevard has long been a bit bohemian. In the 1960s I used to go to a popular coffee house that was located in a converted bungalow on Cole Avenue a block south of Santa Monica, across from the Technicolor plant.
I also have vague memories of going to a short-lived art gallery located in a small commercial building- probably once another corner grocery store- along one of the mostly residential back streets nearby. Many artists and musicians and aspiring actors lived in the area, and some interesting parties took place in its old houses and small apartment buildings. It’s a good neighborhood for a theater.
The Electric Theatre was already listed at 212 N. Main Street in the 1915 L.A. City Directory. Since the building is gone I have no way of finding out how old it was at that time.
The urls of the photos from the USC Archive have been changed yet again since the last time I linked to them. The L.A. Library may misidentify more of its photos than USC does, but at least the library’s urls are stable. I wish they’d both get Flickr accounts.
There’s a photo dated 1930 at the State Library showing part of the theater at right, and there was no marquee yet. The marquee was probably added when it became the Roosevelt.
Creation Theatre and then Garden Theatre. I wonder if the Creation was decorated with a Garden of Eden theme, and when the name was changed the existing style of decoration suggested the new name to the operators?
The city’s population topped 300,000 in the 1910 census, so the area around USC was pretty well built up by then. Some parts of the Woodlawn district were subdivided in the 1890s, and the neighborhood still has quite a few old houses dating from before 1910, and a few from before 1900. I’m not sure when the first streetcar line reached the area, but the Main Street and Agricultural Park Railway, a steam line, was built in 1875 and passed within a few blocks of this theater’s location. I think the line was later electrified, sometime in the 1890s.
Check the historic maps of Los Angeles linked on this page at the University of Texas web site. The 1900 and 1917 maps are especially revealing, as the city had about one hundred thousand people in 1900, and by 1920 had exceeded half a million. Growth was explosive around the time this theater was built.
9615 S. Main Street is given as the location of the Gloria Theatre in the 1929 Los Angeles City Directory. In the 1936 directory it is listed as the Green Meadows Theatre.
The Olympus Theatre is listed at 2014 E. First in the 1915 City Directory, and is still there in the 1929 directory. The Joy shows up in the 1936 directory (the next most recent that the L.A. Library has online.) Unfortunately, the building now on this site was built in 1961, so we can’t check the age of its predecessor.
Maybe someone can get hold of some Sanborn maps and compare descriptions of the type of construction. Or maybe some old photos will turn up so we can see if the Olympus and Joy occupied the same building. But a remodeling or simple renaming does seem more likely than a rebuilding, unless the Olympus burned down, or was irreparably damaged in the 1933 earthquake.
Here’s an interesting puzzle: The 1915 L.A. City Directory lists a movie house called the Gay Theatre at 3945 S. Western. The L.A. County Assessor says that the building at the current address 3941 S. Western was built in 1914. The next lot south has the address 3947 S. Western (and has a building erected in 1930), so 3945 must currently be the address of one of three storefronts in the surviving 1914 building.
So the question is, was the Home Theatre an entirely different theatre, adjacent to or very near the Gay Theatre, or was it a later name for the Gay Theatre itself? The address might have just shifted around a bit over the years. And if they were the same theater, and the address has shifted more than once, is the existing 1914 building the former location of this theater, or was the theater in a building on the lot to the south, currently numbered 3947, or maybe on the now-vacant corner lot which currently has a Leighton Avenue address?
In any case, I can’t find a theater under any name on the west side of the 3900 block of Western Avenue in the 1929 City Directory (and I don’t have access to any directories between 1915 and 1929.) However, the Western Theatre across the street at 3930 is listed in 1929.
It’s possible that the Gay Theatre was built in 1914, and then closed after the Home Theatre was built down the block, and then the Home closed when the larger Western Theatre was built across the street. The Rivoli Theatre, opened in 1921, was only a few blocks south, too, so that would have been a lot of screens for that short stretch of street.
But the Gay and the Home have been gone so long that the odds of finding out if they were the same place or not are probably slim. City Directory listings for either theater in years between 1915 and 1929 would certainly be of use to discover if there were any address changes during that time, though. I hope the library gets a few of them online soon.
Now that the L.A. County Assessor’s office has parcel information online, I’ve been able to find out that the building now on this site was built in 1914. The building which housed the Gaumont Chronophone Theatre in 1908 was demolished nearly a century ago.
The 25,000 sq. ft. building on this parcel (starting with the address 1011 North Broadway and extending to the corner of Cottage Home Street) was built in 1962, with an effectively-built date of 1964, according the the L.A. County Assessor’s office.
The County Assessor’s office says that this parcel now contains a building erected in 1987. The building that housed the Cine Cienega must have been demolished, and the bar and restaurant must be in the new building that replaced it.
It appears to have operated as McNees Theatre for less than a year. Ralph McNees was a cashier at First National Bank in Whitter who bought a couple of walnut orchards in the area in 1909 and later developed them. Most likely he built the theater as part of his real estate development. There’s a street named after him, too.
The California Index has another card (one that didn’t come up in my previous search) citing a Southwest Builder & Contractor article which named Earl M. Wheatland as the contractor for the Warner Bros. Theatre in Whittier. The Index dates the article to 1/11/1929, but I think that might have been a typo. The citation of the Whitter News article about the McNees re-opening as Warner Bros. Whittier was dated 11/26/1929, so the typist might have gotten the date and month reversed for the SwB&C article.
In any case, the Whittier News article was explicit about McNees becoming the Warner Bros. Whittier, but there’s nothing in the Index about how long Warners operated it. It’s also possible that they didn’t use their name on the theater or in its advertising, and just called it the Whittier Theatre, but that would have been uncharacteristic of the company at that time (Warner Bros. Downtown Theatre, Warner Bros. Western Theatre, Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre, etc.)
The Hudson Plaza Cinema opened on December 22, 1967, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of January 1, 1968. It was one of five new theaters opened across the country by General Cinema on the same day.
Here’s a brief item from Boxoffice Magazine, May 28, 1962:
My first visit to the Cinema must have been fairly soon after this. I don’t remember ever seeing the old marquee, or being in the theatre before the art gallery (not so elaborate, really) was installed.When the Fox Covina was multiplexed with an addition in 1972, the total seating capacity was upped from 814 to 1,316, according to an item in Boxoffice Magazine, November 20, 1972.
The July 5, 1965, issue of Boxoffice Magazine said that Associated Independent Theatres of the West would open the Camelback Theatre in Scottsdale that summer. The new house had 850 seats.
The January 17, 1966, issue of Boxoffice included the Camelback in its annual list of theatres opened during the previous year.
Boxoffice Magazine’s issue of September 11, 1961, published an article about three theaters being planned by Stein Enterprises, the development arm of Statewide Theatres. The Capri was one of them, and the caption of a drawing of it said it was scheduled for a September 18 groundbreaking. I can’t find any later Boxoffice articles about the Capri, but it seems likely that it opened in 1962.
Loew’s Theatres Inc.’s annual report for 1967 said that the company had acquired 30 theaters from Statewide that year, and mentioned the Capri as being among the acquisitions. See my comment of March 8, 2007, above, for later developments at the Capri.
Here’s a link to a PDF of Loew’s 1967 annual report, for anyone who might be interested.
The Eastland Center neighborhood suffered some long delays before it got its movie house. A local exhibitor named Sid Pink had plans to build a 1000 seat theater there as early as 1956, according to the April 7, 1956, issue of Boxoffice Magazine, which said that ground was to be broken soon for the new theater.
Then the March 3, 1958, issue of Boxoffice published a drawing of Sid Pink’s new 1,100 seat theater, with a caption saying it was “…now being built.” The announcement was a bit premature, it seems.
When construction of the Eastland Theatre really began at last, in 1961, it was a project of the Sanborn Theatres circuit. I guess everybody got tired of waiting for Sid Pink to get his show on the road.
Here is a PDF file of the Winter, 1992, issue of SoCal Cinemas' house organ, with a brief article about the 30th anniversary celebration for the Eastland Theatre, which was held on November 21 that year. It mentions that Jayne Mansfield had made a personal appearance for the Eastland’s opening night.
A Boxoffice Magazine item from the issue of September 15, 1969, confirms that the Wescove opened as a twin, on August 20, 1969. Boxoffice named the designers of the theater as the South Pasadena firm of Smith & Williams.
Whitney R. Smith and Wayne R. Williams were very well known for their midcentury modern designs, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of them designing a theater. I wonder if they did any others? It would really bite if somebody has knocked down the only Smith & Williams theater in the world for a parking lot.
The Wescove had become a triplex by August, 1986, when it was being operated by SoCal Cinemas (the Sanborn Theatres circuit’s later name.) Their listings gave the address as 1450 West Covina Parkway. The house had still been listed as a twin in the Independent Theatres listings of the L.A. Times in February, 1971.
The July 9, 1949, issue of Boxoffice magazine published an item saying that the Rio Theatre in Monte Rio had recently opened. Owners of the 500 seat independent house were S.A. Bartlett and S.A. Bartlett Jr., formerly operators of a theater in Grass Valley.
The twinning of the Bay Theatre took place in 1972. The house reopened as the Bay Twin on August 24, according to Boxoffice Magazine’s September 18 issue that year. The owners had the theater’s interior entirely stripped and rebuilt, rather than merely splitting the original 1100 seat auditorium with a wall. The new twin auditoriums each had 400 seats.
Mike L: You’ll find links to the Cinema Treasures pages for various theaters in Culver City on this page.
Neither of the new multiplexes is on the site of either the Meralta or the Culver. The Meralta’s site is now occupied by an office building, and the Culver is still operating, as a live performance venue called the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The Culver Plaza multiplex is across Culver Boulevard from it.
Also, the Fox Wilshire still exists, and presents concerts and live theater events as the Wilshire Theatre Beverly Hills. Here’s a link to its Cinema Treasures page.
I’ve found a better map. It shows the streetcar lines in Los Angeles in 1906, and the area around the Pictorial is included. For anybody trying to pin down the locations of theaters when they are listed in early city directories or newspaper ads with old street names that have since been changed, this map can be very useful.
The map is called Red Cars and Yellow Cars, and is linked from this Library of Congress page. You can use the map online with a zoom feature, or download the whole thing in a 7.5MB jpeg file.
billy byron: I missed your comment earlier, as my e-mail service no longer sends me notifications for new Cinema Treasures comments.
If you get back to this page, could you please click on this link to a 1951 Life Magazine photo and tell me if the theater the photo depicts is the Mission? The Life Magazine archive says the building is in Los Angeles, but I think it must be in Ventura, or at least in Ventura County. If it isn’t the Mission, do you recognize the theater at all?
When I came across the listing of the Ivy Theatre in the 1915 city directory, I couldn’t place El Centro Avenue. It never occurred to me it would be El Centro Avenue in Hollywood, and I found it only by Googling the address. I was astonished to find that there was still a theatre in the building, and that it was a locally famous theater I’d actually seen advertised in the L.A. Times for years (though I’ve never been to a play there.)
The part of Hollywood south of Santa Monica Boulevard has long been a bit bohemian. In the 1960s I used to go to a popular coffee house that was located in a converted bungalow on Cole Avenue a block south of Santa Monica, across from the Technicolor plant.
I also have vague memories of going to a short-lived art gallery located in a small commercial building- probably once another corner grocery store- along one of the mostly residential back streets nearby. Many artists and musicians and aspiring actors lived in the area, and some interesting parties took place in its old houses and small apartment buildings. It’s a good neighborhood for a theater.
The Electric Theatre was already listed at 212 N. Main Street in the 1915 L.A. City Directory. Since the building is gone I have no way of finding out how old it was at that time.
The urls of the photos from the USC Archive have been changed yet again since the last time I linked to them. The L.A. Library may misidentify more of its photos than USC does, but at least the library’s urls are stable. I wish they’d both get Flickr accounts.
Here’s the ca.1935 photo with the theater in the distance.
Here is the 1936 photo with a fairly decent view of the marquee.
There’s a photo dated 1930 at the State Library showing part of the theater at right, and there was no marquee yet. The marquee was probably added when it became the Roosevelt.
Creation Theatre and then Garden Theatre. I wonder if the Creation was decorated with a Garden of Eden theme, and when the name was changed the existing style of decoration suggested the new name to the operators?
The city’s population topped 300,000 in the 1910 census, so the area around USC was pretty well built up by then. Some parts of the Woodlawn district were subdivided in the 1890s, and the neighborhood still has quite a few old houses dating from before 1910, and a few from before 1900. I’m not sure when the first streetcar line reached the area, but the Main Street and Agricultural Park Railway, a steam line, was built in 1875 and passed within a few blocks of this theater’s location. I think the line was later electrified, sometime in the 1890s.
Check the historic maps of Los Angeles linked on this page at the University of Texas web site. The 1900 and 1917 maps are especially revealing, as the city had about one hundred thousand people in 1900, and by 1920 had exceeded half a million. Growth was explosive around the time this theater was built.
The Woodlawn Theatre was listed at 151 E. Santa Barbara Avenue in the 1915 City Directory.
9615 S. Main Street is given as the location of the Gloria Theatre in the 1929 Los Angeles City Directory. In the 1936 directory it is listed as the Green Meadows Theatre.
The Olympus Theatre is listed at 2014 E. First in the 1915 City Directory, and is still there in the 1929 directory. The Joy shows up in the 1936 directory (the next most recent that the L.A. Library has online.) Unfortunately, the building now on this site was built in 1961, so we can’t check the age of its predecessor.
Maybe someone can get hold of some Sanborn maps and compare descriptions of the type of construction. Or maybe some old photos will turn up so we can see if the Olympus and Joy occupied the same building. But a remodeling or simple renaming does seem more likely than a rebuilding, unless the Olympus burned down, or was irreparably damaged in the 1933 earthquake.
Here’s an interesting puzzle: The 1915 L.A. City Directory lists a movie house called the Gay Theatre at 3945 S. Western. The L.A. County Assessor says that the building at the current address 3941 S. Western was built in 1914. The next lot south has the address 3947 S. Western (and has a building erected in 1930), so 3945 must currently be the address of one of three storefronts in the surviving 1914 building.
So the question is, was the Home Theatre an entirely different theatre, adjacent to or very near the Gay Theatre, or was it a later name for the Gay Theatre itself? The address might have just shifted around a bit over the years. And if they were the same theater, and the address has shifted more than once, is the existing 1914 building the former location of this theater, or was the theater in a building on the lot to the south, currently numbered 3947, or maybe on the now-vacant corner lot which currently has a Leighton Avenue address?
In any case, I can’t find a theater under any name on the west side of the 3900 block of Western Avenue in the 1929 City Directory (and I don’t have access to any directories between 1915 and 1929.) However, the Western Theatre across the street at 3930 is listed in 1929.
It’s possible that the Gay Theatre was built in 1914, and then closed after the Home Theatre was built down the block, and then the Home closed when the larger Western Theatre was built across the street. The Rivoli Theatre, opened in 1921, was only a few blocks south, too, so that would have been a lot of screens for that short stretch of street.
But the Gay and the Home have been gone so long that the odds of finding out if they were the same place or not are probably slim. City Directory listings for either theater in years between 1915 and 1929 would certainly be of use to discover if there were any address changes during that time, though. I hope the library gets a few of them online soon.
The architect’s correct middle initial is “J”, rather than the “G” which I wrote in the introduction.
Now that the L.A. County Assessor’s office has parcel information online, I’ve been able to find out that the building now on this site was built in 1914. The building which housed the Gaumont Chronophone Theatre in 1908 was demolished nearly a century ago.
The 25,000 sq. ft. building on this parcel (starting with the address 1011 North Broadway and extending to the corner of Cottage Home Street) was built in 1962, with an effectively-built date of 1964, according the the L.A. County Assessor’s office.
The County Assessor’s office says that this parcel now contains a building erected in 1987. The building that housed the Cine Cienega must have been demolished, and the bar and restaurant must be in the new building that replaced it.
It appears to have operated as McNees Theatre for less than a year. Ralph McNees was a cashier at First National Bank in Whitter who bought a couple of walnut orchards in the area in 1909 and later developed them. Most likely he built the theater as part of his real estate development. There’s a street named after him, too.
The California Index has another card (one that didn’t come up in my previous search) citing a Southwest Builder & Contractor article which named Earl M. Wheatland as the contractor for the Warner Bros. Theatre in Whittier. The Index dates the article to 1/11/1929, but I think that might have been a typo. The citation of the Whitter News article about the McNees re-opening as Warner Bros. Whittier was dated 11/26/1929, so the typist might have gotten the date and month reversed for the SwB&C article.
In any case, the Whittier News article was explicit about McNees becoming the Warner Bros. Whittier, but there’s nothing in the Index about how long Warners operated it. It’s also possible that they didn’t use their name on the theater or in its advertising, and just called it the Whittier Theatre, but that would have been uncharacteristic of the company at that time (Warner Bros. Downtown Theatre, Warner Bros. Western Theatre, Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre, etc.)