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 County Assessor’s office gives an original construction date of 1927, and an effectively-built date of 1935, for this building. Judging from the Google Maps satellite and street views, it looks like this might be a case of a theatre being built behind an earlier commercial building that was remodeled, or added to at one end, to provide an entrance to the auditorium. That would make 1935 the probable opening year.
The current church entrance in Ken’s photos must be in a former storefront, and the theatre entrance, now blocked up, was probably at the southern end of the building where the moderne tower is. I’m inclined to think this was an addition rather than a remodeled section of the earlier building. The photos show the cracks that reveal the shapes of the now-sealed shop windows on the old part of the building, with those angled corners at the tops, characteristic of many 1920s commercial buildings but seldom used by the 1930s.
Additional information: Here is a PDF file of the July, 1991, issue of the Whittier Conservancy’s newsletter, with an item saying that the city had allowed to owner of the Whittier Theatre to demolish the building. This was four years after the theater had been closed following the 1987 earthquake. As the building had stood for four years in its damaged state, it’s obvious that it was repairable.
I can’t believe it took me so long to find these, but the California Index contains cards indicating two early aka’s for this house. A card citing the L.A. Times of February 3, 1929, in an article headed “Work started on Whittier Theater” calls it McNee’s Theatre. Another card cites the Whittier News, issue of November 26, 1929, saying that the McNee Theatre was re-opening as Warner Bros. Whittier Theatre.
Not coincidentally, I think, the small, triangular park across Gretna Avenue from the theater is still called McNees Park.
So we have a probable opening date of mid-1929, as McNees Theatre; a name change to Warner Bros Whittier Theatre in November, 1929; a name change to Bruen’s Whittier Theatre at some later date (I’d guess no later than the early 1940s); and then a still later change to simply the Whittier Theatre, the name under which it was operated by Pacific Theatres.
Also, the address still needs to be updated to 11612 Whittier Blvd, Whittier, CA 90601, in order for the Google Maps link to show the actual location. Right now it fetches a spot several miles east, in La Habra.
The info should give the aka Cineplex Beverly Center, the name it had in the L.A. Times theater listings in the 1980s.
I never went to this theater, and was only in the Beverly Center itself twice. I urgently desire never to see a movie here, or to enter the Beverly Center ever again.
I’m convinced that the entire Beverly Center complex was dropped onto the landscape by an alien spacecraft, and then the aliens used a mind-control ray to gull humans into thinking the monstrosity had been legally and deliberately erected by a developer. Someday the Intergalactic Court will require the offenders to return to Earth and remove their hideous heap of discarded refuse. I don’t want to be inside the place when that happens. (/rant)
Google Maps is upset that the address above says La Brea Blvd. instead of the correct La Brea Avenue. It shows a map of the whole United States and asks “Did you mean 3741 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90016?” Then you have to click their link before they will show you the local map.
Looks like Google Maps is even pickier about details than I am.
The information about properties in the City of Los Angeles is available from two sites- ZIMAS, the City Planning Department’s information service, which shows it both on a web page (with a map) and in a .pdf file report, which will have an entirely different type face; and the L.A. County Assessor’s parcel viewer (a somewhat cranky site.) Dating info at both sites comes from the Assessor’s office.
Everything at both sites appears to be digitally generated from a database, but the database itself might have been generated from scans of original documents by some sort of document reader program. The database gets updated whenever there’s a change in a parcel’s status, which is probably done by keyboard entry. There are definitely some mistakes in the database, though I’ve only found a few I know to be wrong. The system appears to be reliable at least 99% of the time.
It was already called the Wigwam Theatre in 1915, according to the listing in the L.A. City Directory that year. Wigwam Theatre might have been its opening name.
The 1915 L.A. City Directory gives the exact address of the Bear Theatre as 827 W. Third Street. That means Bear Theatre was most likely an early aka for the Lux Theatre at that address.
The Savoy Theatre is listed at 5326 S. Central again in the 1915 L.A. City Directory. The address as currently listed above on this page definitely has the two middle numbers reversed.
A Playhouse Theatre, at 1236 W. Seventh Street, was listed among the movie houses in the 1915 L.A. City Directory.
Google Maps gets the right location for this parcel, but their Street View feature totally blows it, showing a spot east of the freeway when you try to view anything east of Hartford Avenue.
I’m still convinced that the Playhouse Theatre building has not been demolished.
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.)
The County Assessor’s office gives an original construction date of 1927, and an effectively-built date of 1935, for this building. Judging from the Google Maps satellite and street views, it looks like this might be a case of a theatre being built behind an earlier commercial building that was remodeled, or added to at one end, to provide an entrance to the auditorium. That would make 1935 the probable opening year.
The current church entrance in Ken’s photos must be in a former storefront, and the theatre entrance, now blocked up, was probably at the southern end of the building where the moderne tower is. I’m inclined to think this was an addition rather than a remodeled section of the earlier building. The photos show the cracks that reveal the shapes of the now-sealed shop windows on the old part of the building, with those angled corners at the tops, characteristic of many 1920s commercial buildings but seldom used by the 1930s.
Additional information: Here is a PDF file of the July, 1991, issue of the Whittier Conservancy’s newsletter, with an item saying that the city had allowed to owner of the Whittier Theatre to demolish the building. This was four years after the theater had been closed following the 1987 earthquake. As the building had stood for four years in its damaged state, it’s obvious that it was repairable.
I can’t believe it took me so long to find these, but the California Index contains cards indicating two early aka’s for this house. A card citing the L.A. Times of February 3, 1929, in an article headed “Work started on Whittier Theater” calls it McNee’s Theatre. Another card cites the Whittier News, issue of November 26, 1929, saying that the McNee Theatre was re-opening as Warner Bros. Whittier Theatre.
Not coincidentally, I think, the small, triangular park across Gretna Avenue from the theater is still called McNees Park.
So we have a probable opening date of mid-1929, as McNees Theatre; a name change to Warner Bros Whittier Theatre in November, 1929; a name change to Bruen’s Whittier Theatre at some later date (I’d guess no later than the early 1940s); and then a still later change to simply the Whittier Theatre, the name under which it was operated by Pacific Theatres.
Also, the address still needs to be updated to 11612 Whittier Blvd, Whittier, CA 90601, in order for the Google Maps link to show the actual location. Right now it fetches a spot several miles east, in La Habra.
The info should give the aka Cineplex Beverly Center, the name it had in the L.A. Times theater listings in the 1980s.
I never went to this theater, and was only in the Beverly Center itself twice. I urgently desire never to see a movie here, or to enter the Beverly Center ever again.
I’m convinced that the entire Beverly Center complex was dropped onto the landscape by an alien spacecraft, and then the aliens used a mind-control ray to gull humans into thinking the monstrosity had been legally and deliberately erected by a developer. Someday the Intergalactic Court will require the offenders to return to Earth and remove their hideous heap of discarded refuse. I don’t want to be inside the place when that happens. (/rant)
Google Maps is upset that the address above says La Brea Blvd. instead of the correct La Brea Avenue. It shows a map of the whole United States and asks “Did you mean 3741 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90016?” Then you have to click their link before they will show you the local map.
Looks like Google Maps is even pickier about details than I am.
The information about properties in the City of Los Angeles is available from two sites- ZIMAS, the City Planning Department’s information service, which shows it both on a web page (with a map) and in a .pdf file report, which will have an entirely different type face; and the L.A. County Assessor’s parcel viewer (a somewhat cranky site.) Dating info at both sites comes from the Assessor’s office.
Everything at both sites appears to be digitally generated from a database, but the database itself might have been generated from scans of original documents by some sort of document reader program. The database gets updated whenever there’s a change in a parcel’s status, which is probably done by keyboard entry. There are definitely some mistakes in the database, though I’ve only found a few I know to be wrong. The system appears to be reliable at least 99% of the time.
It was already called the Wigwam Theatre in 1915, according to the listing in the L.A. City Directory that year. Wigwam Theatre might have been its opening name.
The 1915 L.A. City Directory gives the exact address of the Bear Theatre as 827 W. Third Street. That means Bear Theatre was most likely an early aka for the Lux Theatre at that address.
The Savoy Theatre is listed at 5326 S. Central again in the 1915 L.A. City Directory. The address as currently listed above on this page definitely has the two middle numbers reversed.
A Playhouse Theatre, at 1236 W. Seventh Street, was listed among the movie houses in the 1915 L.A. City Directory.
Google Maps gets the right location for this parcel, but their Street View feature totally blows it, showing a spot east of the freeway when you try to view anything east of Hartford Avenue.
I’m still convinced that the Playhouse Theatre building has not been demolished.
A Merryland Theatre is listed at 1015 E. Seventh Street in the 1915 L.A. City Directory.
Listed in the 1915 City Directory as Gore’s Theatre, 1002 W. 9th, so that definitely is an aka.