I wonder what became of the black metalwork around the facade that was uncovered in the early stages of the demolition, as seen in the photo linked by FPCInc on February 20th? When they didn’t save the Japanese style facade from the post-WWII remodeling, I expected they might at least preserve what was apparently the original 1924 decoration from the Civic Theatre.
When William refers to “an early form of stadium seating” he means that the Loyola was one of many theatres which had a stadium seating section at the back of the auditorium, behind a section of normal theatre seating. The earliest theatre with such an arrangement that I’ve ever been in was the Rialto on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles (closed), which was built in 1917.
The stadium section seating in these old theatres was configured exactly the way it is in a modern stadium-style theatre- or, for that matter, in the balcony of any older theatre. In fact, one of the neighborhood theatres I attended when I was a kid, the Monterey (demolished) in Monterey Park, had a stadium section, but everybody called it “the balcony”.
There have been quite a few such theatres, and I’ve now and then seen photos of some of them, but offhand the only URL I can find is for this picture from the USC digital archives which shows the view of the auditorium from the top of the stadium section of the aptly-named Fox Stadium Theatre (now a synagogue) in Los Angeles.
wdl: A Principal Theater at 223 N. Main St. is listed on Cinema Treasures, but so far nobody has added any information about it. That location would have been on the west side of Main north of Temple. Everything on that block was demolished for Civic Center expansion ages ago.
If the Hidalgo was next door to the Plaza Church, then it must be the theater listed on Cinema Treasures as the Estella. That building has also been demolished. There are a few comments on the page, but most of them are about the theater’s location, not about the theater itself.
I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but there’s typically very little information available on the Internet (almost the only source I have available now) about these smaller theaters.
silverlining: You’re at the wrong address for that party. The theatre you recall must be the Century Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, originally called the Hunley Theatre. On that page you’ll find comments from many other former patrons of that theatre. This page is for another Century Theatre, located on Broadway at 60th Street in South Los Angeles.
ken mc: 842 S. Main was (according to a 1914 newspaper article quoted by vokoban in a December 22, 2005 comment on the Optic Theatre page) the location of Miller’s Theatre, about midway between the California Theatre and 9th Street. (Miller’s still hasn’t been added to Cinema Treasures.) It seems possible that the operators of the Roosevelt at 212 N. Main lost their lease and moved their operation to the old Miller’s location. It would have been easy for the N. Main building to revert to its earlier name of the Electric Theatre, as the marquee only had the generic word “Theatre” (or is that “Theater”… the photo I linked to last October is a bit blurry) on it.
Ken mc: The Wonderland is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Jade Theatre which, according to the comments, lasted into the 1970s at least. I have no memory of it at all, though I passed along that block hundreds of times over earlier years.
The Directory of Colorado State Register Properties entry about the Bluebird Theatre says that it was “…the first Denver theater designed specifically for the exhibition of movies.” They give the opening year as 1914.
Glenn Bianchi, owner of this multiplex, is the son of Joseph Bianchi who opened the Paramount Drive-In in 1947. Here is a recent Press-Telegram article about the Bianchis and their theatres.
This theatre was opened as the Roadium Drive-In in 1947. The area was then called Clearwater. The owner was local businessman Joseph Bianchi, whose son is Glen Bianchi, owner of the Bianchi Theatres. The Paramount Drive-In has, since 1955, hosted the Paramount Swap Meet, now the largest daily swap meet in California. Though the Drive-In has long since closed, the swap meet is still operated by the Bianchi family.
The L.A. Times of February 10, 1971 lists the Capri Theatre at 444 S. Glendora Avenue. It was a single screen house being operated by Loew’s Theatres. The L.A. Times of August 24, 1986 lists the Capri as a triplex being operated by SoCal Cinemas.
Ken mc: The Laughlin had a wider entrance. See this correctly labeled picture: http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater1/00014862.jpg
I think the picture you linked to definitely depicts the Palace, which had a very narrow entrance. An even better reason for believing that the LAPL has erroneously named this photo as being of the Laughlin is the fact that the name “Palace” can be made out (just barely), inscribed on the floor just in front of that pair of duded up fellows posing for the camera.
The Fox Wilshire is no longer being operated by the Nederlander organization. This means they are severing their connection to the venue two years earlier than was arranged in the three year lease-back agreement they made with the owners last year, noted in this article in the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Somehow I missed the announcement of the transfer of ownership of the building from Nederlander to the Temple of the Arts synagogue at the time it happened last year.
I also don’t know what this latest development means for the future of the building or the type of events that will be presented there, but with Nederlander out of the picture it seems unlikely that there will be any more Broadway shows among those events. They will probably be going to the Pantages and the Henry Fonda Music Box in Hollywood, both of which Nederlander still operates.
Wikipedia’s article on the Fox Theatre Circuit is pretty thin. I’ve thought about expanding it myself, but haven’t had the time. In fact, all the Internet sources on this subject are pretty thin. There’s a decent thumbnail biography of William Fox on the website of the St. Louis Fox Theatre, here. He started with a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904, and through expansions and mergers with other companies built the chain into one of the world’s largest before losing control of it in the early 1930s.
Fox took over the West Coast Theatre Circuit, which became its largest division, in the 1920s. West Coast was itself the result of a series of expansions and mergers. You can find a few bits of information about it on the Internet by doing Google searches on the names “Turner and Dahnken”, and “Turner, Dahnken and Langley”, which were predecessor companies. They also operated some theatres under the name T&D, but T&D Junior was a later company they started, not part of Fox.
Most of Fox-West Coast ended up in the hands of National General Theatres in the 1960s, and then much of it became part of Mann Theatres (including Fox’s flagship and most famous theatre, Grauman’s Chinese.) Today, of course, most of the Fox empire is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, parent company of the various Fox Television operations.
I think kenmc’s broken link was to this picture, which definitely shows the Warner Hollywood, not the Warner Downtown as the picture’s info page claims. LAPL seems to get about 1%-2% of their captions wrong, which I guess is pretty good for a collection of 60,000 pictures, but you do have to watch out for their errors.
The Adams was one of four theatres with Egyptian style interiors (none had Egyptian exteriors) designed for the Bard Theatre Circuit by architect Lewis Smith in the 1920s. The Vista Theatre in East Hollywood was the smallest, and the only one of the four still largely intact.
The Garfield Theatre in Alhambra was about the same size as the Adams, having a large auditorium with no balcony. A successful suburban theatre operated for many years by the Edwards circuit, and remodeled more than once, it’s Egyptian decor was gone by the late 1950’s. The Garfield’s auditorium was demolished only a few years ago, but the commercial and apartment block in front of it remains standing.
The largest of the four was Bard’s Pasadena, still in operation but virtually unrecognizable as the Academy Theatre, a six-screen art house opened in the mid ‘80s. The Academy had retained its Egyptian style until the mid 1950s when it underwent an extensive remodeling inside and out which gave it an Art Moderne look. It continued to operate as a single-screen theatre until about 1984, by which time it was getting pretty run down.
The Bard circuit had a fifth Egyptian style theatre, Bard’s Glendale, later operated by Fox-West Coast as the Glen Theatre, but that one was designed by Pasadena architect Kenneth A. Gordon rather than Smith. The Glen closed in the 1950s and was converted into a bowling alley. The building still stands, but none of the original interior decoration remains.
If the plans of the Washington Stage Guild come to fruition, the site of the Gayety/Shubert will once again house a legitimate theatre; a 250 seat house scheduled to open in the spring of 2008.
Ironstone Vineyards, owners of the Robert Morgan pipe organ formerly in the Alhambra Theatre, built the Alhambra Music Room at their winery to house it.
Here is a 1985 photo of the Boulevard Cinema in Canoga Park from the L.A. Public Library collection. The L.A. Times Calender section of August 24, 1986, lists the Boulevard at 6937 Topanga, so this must be the place!
In the Independent Theatre Guide of the L.A. Times, February 10, 1971, this theatre was already listed as the Park Theatre and was showing adult films. It was also one of the ten houses listed in the Pussycat Theatres ad in that same issue of the Times.
The UA Granada Hills 7, then called the UA Movies, was one of four San Fernando Valley area United Artists multiplexes listed in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday, August 24, 1986. The others were the six screen UA Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, the six screen UA Warner Center in Woodland Hills, and the five screen UA Movies in Thousand Oaks. I can’t find the Thousand Oaks theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, but it was at 382 Hillcrest Drive, in The Oaks Shopping Center.
All three theatres were very close together, but I don’t think they were all open at the same time. I’m pretty sure the Hawaii closed a few years before the building the X 1&2 was in was converted into a theatre. I can’t remember what was in that building before.
shatter: The World was in the dark building at far left, beyond the parking lot you can see in the first of the three pictures hollywood90038 linked to above. If you look at the third of the three pictures, you can see a corner of the building where the Hawaii Theatre was located, just past another parking lot east of the Florentine Gardens.
I wonder what became of the black metalwork around the facade that was uncovered in the early stages of the demolition, as seen in the photo linked by FPCInc on February 20th? When they didn’t save the Japanese style facade from the post-WWII remodeling, I expected they might at least preserve what was apparently the original 1924 decoration from the Civic Theatre.
Carolyn C.: Yes, the tower of the Fox Wilshire building contained offices, leased to a variety of businesses.
When William refers to “an early form of stadium seating” he means that the Loyola was one of many theatres which had a stadium seating section at the back of the auditorium, behind a section of normal theatre seating. The earliest theatre with such an arrangement that I’ve ever been in was the Rialto on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles (closed), which was built in 1917.
The stadium section seating in these old theatres was configured exactly the way it is in a modern stadium-style theatre- or, for that matter, in the balcony of any older theatre. In fact, one of the neighborhood theatres I attended when I was a kid, the Monterey (demolished) in Monterey Park, had a stadium section, but everybody called it “the balcony”.
There have been quite a few such theatres, and I’ve now and then seen photos of some of them, but offhand the only URL I can find is for this picture from the USC digital archives which shows the view of the auditorium from the top of the stadium section of the aptly-named Fox Stadium Theatre (now a synagogue) in Los Angeles.
wdl: A Principal Theater at 223 N. Main St. is listed on Cinema Treasures, but so far nobody has added any information about it. That location would have been on the west side of Main north of Temple. Everything on that block was demolished for Civic Center expansion ages ago.
If the Hidalgo was next door to the Plaza Church, then it must be the theater listed on Cinema Treasures as the Estella. That building has also been demolished. There are a few comments on the page, but most of them are about the theater’s location, not about the theater itself.
I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but there’s typically very little information available on the Internet (almost the only source I have available now) about these smaller theaters.
silverlining: You’re at the wrong address for that party. The theatre you recall must be the Century Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, originally called the Hunley Theatre. On that page you’ll find comments from many other former patrons of that theatre. This page is for another Century Theatre, located on Broadway at 60th Street in South Los Angeles.
ken mc: 842 S. Main was (according to a 1914 newspaper article quoted by vokoban in a December 22, 2005 comment on the Optic Theatre page) the location of Miller’s Theatre, about midway between the California Theatre and 9th Street. (Miller’s still hasn’t been added to Cinema Treasures.) It seems possible that the operators of the Roosevelt at 212 N. Main lost their lease and moved their operation to the old Miller’s location. It would have been easy for the N. Main building to revert to its earlier name of the Electric Theatre, as the marquee only had the generic word “Theatre” (or is that “Theater”… the photo I linked to last October is a bit blurry) on it.
Ken mc: The Wonderland is listed at Cinema Treasures under its later name, the Jade Theatre which, according to the comments, lasted into the 1970s at least. I have no memory of it at all, though I passed along that block hundreds of times over earlier years.
The Directory of Colorado State Register Properties entry about the Bluebird Theatre says that it was “…the first Denver theater designed specifically for the exhibition of movies.” They give the opening year as 1914.
Official website.
The Lakeport Cinema 5 is run by the same independent company which operates the Paradise Cinema 7 in Paradise, California.
Glenn Bianchi, owner of this multiplex, is the son of Joseph Bianchi who opened the Paramount Drive-In in 1947. Here is a recent Press-Telegram article about the Bianchis and their theatres.
This theatre was opened as the Roadium Drive-In in 1947. The area was then called Clearwater. The owner was local businessman Joseph Bianchi, whose son is Glen Bianchi, owner of the Bianchi Theatres. The Paramount Drive-In has, since 1955, hosted the Paramount Swap Meet, now the largest daily swap meet in California. Though the Drive-In has long since closed, the swap meet is still operated by the Bianchi family.
The L.A. Times of February 10, 1971 lists the Capri Theatre at 444 S. Glendora Avenue. It was a single screen house being operated by Loew’s Theatres. The L.A. Times of August 24, 1986 lists the Capri as a triplex being operated by SoCal Cinemas.
Ken mc: The Laughlin had a wider entrance. See this correctly labeled picture:
http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater1/00014862.jpg
I think the picture you linked to definitely depicts the Palace, which had a very narrow entrance. An even better reason for believing that the LAPL has erroneously named this photo as being of the Laughlin is the fact that the name “Palace” can be made out (just barely), inscribed on the floor just in front of that pair of duded up fellows posing for the camera.
I’d say that the LAPL picture is definitely this Palace Theatre, which opened in 1916. Even in later years the Palace had that very narrow entrance.
The Fox Wilshire is no longer being operated by the Nederlander organization. This means they are severing their connection to the venue two years earlier than was arranged in the three year lease-back agreement they made with the owners last year, noted in this article in the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Somehow I missed the announcement of the transfer of ownership of the building from Nederlander to the Temple of the Arts synagogue at the time it happened last year.
I also don’t know what this latest development means for the future of the building or the type of events that will be presented there, but with Nederlander out of the picture it seems unlikely that there will be any more Broadway shows among those events. They will probably be going to the Pantages and the Henry Fonda Music Box in Hollywood, both of which Nederlander still operates.
Wikipedia’s article on the Fox Theatre Circuit is pretty thin. I’ve thought about expanding it myself, but haven’t had the time. In fact, all the Internet sources on this subject are pretty thin. There’s a decent thumbnail biography of William Fox on the website of the St. Louis Fox Theatre, here. He started with a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904, and through expansions and mergers with other companies built the chain into one of the world’s largest before losing control of it in the early 1930s.
Fox took over the West Coast Theatre Circuit, which became its largest division, in the 1920s. West Coast was itself the result of a series of expansions and mergers. You can find a few bits of information about it on the Internet by doing Google searches on the names “Turner and Dahnken”, and “Turner, Dahnken and Langley”, which were predecessor companies. They also operated some theatres under the name T&D, but T&D Junior was a later company they started, not part of Fox.
Most of Fox-West Coast ended up in the hands of National General Theatres in the 1960s, and then much of it became part of Mann Theatres (including Fox’s flagship and most famous theatre, Grauman’s Chinese.) Today, of course, most of the Fox empire is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, parent company of the various Fox Television operations.
I think kenmc’s broken link was to this picture, which definitely shows the Warner Hollywood, not the Warner Downtown as the picture’s info page claims. LAPL seems to get about 1%-2% of their captions wrong, which I guess is pretty good for a collection of 60,000 pictures, but you do have to watch out for their errors.
The Adams was one of four theatres with Egyptian style interiors (none had Egyptian exteriors) designed for the Bard Theatre Circuit by architect Lewis Smith in the 1920s. The Vista Theatre in East Hollywood was the smallest, and the only one of the four still largely intact.
The Garfield Theatre in Alhambra was about the same size as the Adams, having a large auditorium with no balcony. A successful suburban theatre operated for many years by the Edwards circuit, and remodeled more than once, it’s Egyptian decor was gone by the late 1950’s. The Garfield’s auditorium was demolished only a few years ago, but the commercial and apartment block in front of it remains standing.
The largest of the four was Bard’s Pasadena, still in operation but virtually unrecognizable as the Academy Theatre, a six-screen art house opened in the mid ‘80s. The Academy had retained its Egyptian style until the mid 1950s when it underwent an extensive remodeling inside and out which gave it an Art Moderne look. It continued to operate as a single-screen theatre until about 1984, by which time it was getting pretty run down.
The Bard circuit had a fifth Egyptian style theatre, Bard’s Glendale, later operated by Fox-West Coast as the Glen Theatre, but that one was designed by Pasadena architect Kenneth A. Gordon rather than Smith. The Glen closed in the 1950s and was converted into a bowling alley. The building still stands, but none of the original interior decoration remains.
If the plans of the Washington Stage Guild come to fruition, the site of the Gayety/Shubert will once again house a legitimate theatre; a 250 seat house scheduled to open in the spring of 2008.
Ironstone Vineyards, owners of the Robert Morgan pipe organ formerly in the Alhambra Theatre, built the Alhambra Music Room at their winery to house it.
Here is a 1985 photo of the Boulevard Cinema in Canoga Park from the L.A. Public Library collection. The L.A. Times Calender section of August 24, 1986, lists the Boulevard at 6937 Topanga, so this must be the place!
In the Independent Theatre Guide of the L.A. Times, February 10, 1971, this theatre was already listed as the Park Theatre and was showing adult films. It was also one of the ten houses listed in the Pussycat Theatres ad in that same issue of the Times.
The UA Granada Hills 7, then called the UA Movies, was one of four San Fernando Valley area United Artists multiplexes listed in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday, August 24, 1986. The others were the six screen UA Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, the six screen UA Warner Center in Woodland Hills, and the five screen UA Movies in Thousand Oaks. I can’t find the Thousand Oaks theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, but it was at 382 Hillcrest Drive, in The Oaks Shopping Center.
All three theatres were very close together, but I don’t think they were all open at the same time. I’m pretty sure the Hawaii closed a few years before the building the X 1&2 was in was converted into a theatre. I can’t remember what was in that building before.
shatter: The World was in the dark building at far left, beyond the parking lot you can see in the first of the three pictures hollywood90038 linked to above. If you look at the third of the three pictures, you can see a corner of the building where the Hawaii Theatre was located, just past another parking lot east of the Florentine Gardens.