The construction date of this theatre must be 1904-1905, then. Here is a photo dated 1904 (this date being the earliest possible, as confirmed by the tall, white building at center, which is the Braley Block on the SE corner of 4th and Spring, completed that year) which shows a house (the one topped by a round turret) occupying the site of this theatre.
An aerial view of this theatre from Terraserver shows a building about 120' deep with frontage of about 180' on Western Avenue. Except for the entrance foyer, the frontage looks as though it was occupied by retail shops to a depth of about 50'. The theatre auditorium looks to have been about 70' wide, and was probably about 120'-130' from screen to back wall. I’d have guessed at over 1000 seats for a place that size.
The style looks art moderne, and the building details suggest an early post-WWII construction date rather than a remodeling of something older. My grandparents lived a little more than a dozen blocks from this theatre in the 1950s, but unfortunately when we went to visit them we almost never drove down Western Avenue, and I don’t recall it. There was still quite a bit of new construction going on in the area about that time, though.
That building at far left could be a corner of the California Club, unless it’s the very back of the old Masonic Temple (fronting on Hill Street a few doors north of the College Theatre) which was demolished to make way for the temporary Hill Street Station that operated during the construction of the Subway Terminal building.
The Hill Street Station depicted in that photo was on or adjacent to the Subway Terminal building’s site, just above the middle of the block between 4th and 5th. There had been an interurban depot on that site since 1908. The depot was moved into the Subway Terminal in 1926.
That is the Biltmore beyond the auditorium. That dates the photo at no earlier than 1922. The passenger shed in the picture was demolished in 1924, replaced by a temporary structure farther south, to make way for construction of the Subway Terminal.
Here’s and interesting perspective on this theatre: a photo from about 1922 of the Pacific Electric’s Hill Street Station, and looming behind it are the back and side walls of the Auditorium.
So far, no photos of the Town during its first decade when it was Bard’s Hill Street Theatre have surfaced, but here is a photo from the 1910s showing the east side of Hill Street south of 4th Street. The building which A.C. Martin remodeled for Bard’s Theatre is easy to spot, being the sole one-story structure on the near block, and having a full-width awning.
This picture recently added to the L.A. Library’s on-line photo collection shows Hill Street south of 6th in what is probably the late 1920s. (The library’s information page about the photo misidentifies it as Spring Street ca1920.) At the very left can be seen part of the theatre’s marquee. Another, smaller marquee farther along the same building probably marks the entrance to the dance hall on the second floor.
My source for the September, 1963 closure, April, 1964 fire, and July, 1965 demolition of the charred ruins is an article in the Crenshaw area paper, the News-Advertiser, of July 18, 1965. Pick up a pdf scan of it from the L.A. Library. There’s a barely legible picture of a wall about to get whacked with a big ball.
The Times was right. The Mesa was at Crenshaw and Slauson in the Angeles Mesa district of Los Angeles. Crenshaw and Manchester is in Inglewood. I think the address of 8507 must be wrong. Slauson would be 58th Street if it were numbered, so maybe the first two numbers of the address got transposed when this page was set up?
In the first comment on the page vodvilnut gives a date of 1915 for the construction of this theatre, but the PSTOS page Lost Memory linked to last January gives a construction date of 1911. Both dates also appear at various other sites on the Internet. Can anybody confirm one date or the other? I know that B. Marcus Priteca designed his first Pantages Theatre (in San Francisco) in 1911. Could he have designed and gotten the Seattle house built as well in that same year?
Bway: If you’re still watching this page, the photos RobertR linked to back in 2005 depict the theatre on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard which has been variously known as the Hollywood Playhouse, El Capitan Theater, Hollywood Palace, and the Avalon Hollywood, among other names. Built in 1926, it’s been a playhouse, a television studio (during which time it was the location where Richard Nixon made his famous “Checkers” speech), and a night club, but never a movie theatre. If somebody would lease it for a few months for showing films then we’d be able to give it a page here.
It just dawned on me that 223 N. Main would have been on one of the blocks razed to create the site for City Hall, so that would explain why the Principal Theatre was relocated in the mid 1920s.
The address of Miller’s Theatre was 842 S. Main Street. It was still in operation in 1924, when it and Miller’s California Theatre up the block were both taken over by Loew’s.
Miller’s Theatre can be seen at the far right (with a sunburst decorating its marquee) in this c1917 photograph from the USC digital archives. An ad for the theatre can also be seen on the wall of the tall building at the center of the picture. Before the USC site did away with its zoom feature it was possible to get a closer view of the marquee and see that it advertised “Wm. Fox Photoplays”.
Since the Sunbeam was being advertised in 1935 and Lee’s design dates only from 1937, does that mean he remodeled an old theatre, or was the old building demolished and replaced? Judging from ken mc’s recent photos it looks to me like a thoroughly 1937 vintage building.
The L.A. Library website’s California Index has three cards referencing Southwest Builder & Contractor mentions of an engineer named W.M. Bostock. Though SB&C is notorious for typos, it seldom makes the same typo in every instance. I’ve also found a Los Angeles engineer named W.M. Bostock quoted in a 1933 Time Magazine article, so it’s probable that SB&C got the name right.
As for architect L.M. Bostock, the California Index contains no references to him. If ken mc’s source was The L.A. Times, which has usually been good at keeping typos to a minimum, I’d be inclined to believe that we are dealing with two different guys and L.M. was not just a typo. If L.M. Bostock was an architect, his absence from the California Index suggests that he was a fairly obscure one. But since W.M. is only mentioned in the context of two buildings (Cinemaland and the El Sereno Theatre), I guess he’s pretty obscure himself.
Southwest Builder & Contractor’s issue of August 8, 1937, announced that S. Charles Lee had prepared plans for the theatre at Compton Avenue and 66th Street.
I see in the 1923 Paramount week ad which vokoban has posted in his Flickr collection that the address of the Principal Theatre is 223 North Main Street. It’s unlikely that Paramount would get the address of one of its theatres wrong in an ad that ran regularly, so I’d guess that either there were two Principal Theatres at different times, or the owners of the Principal Theatre moved their operation and its name from 223 N. Main to 423 N. Main sometime between 1923 and 1928.
The Gem would have been a few doors south of the Republic Theatre,a nd very close to 7th Street. It was probably a very early nickelodeon that was torn down before the Board of Trade Building was built. The northernmost storefront in the B of T had the address 443 S. Main.
ken mc: The theatre at 554 S. Broadway actually had the name Tally’s New Broadway displayed on it. I’m not sure that the Broadway Theatre at 428 S. ever had any connection to Tally. Cinema Treasures is the only place I’ve ever seen such a connection asserted. vokoban’s posts of information from the Times archives on Cinema Treasures' Broadway Theatre page show that it opened in 1924 or 1925 and was called (at least in the Times article) the New Broadway Theatre and that by 1926 it was being advertised merely as the Broadway Theatre, no mention of Tally in either case.
I was also wondering if L.M. and W.M. Bostock were related- or maybe the W.M. in the article I cited in 2005 was another of Southwestern Builder & Contractor’s frequent typos? There may have been only an L.M. Bostock.
The Band Box is listed here as Shamrock Theatre.
The construction date of this theatre must be 1904-1905, then. Here is a photo dated 1904 (this date being the earliest possible, as confirmed by the tall, white building at center, which is the Braley Block on the SE corner of 4th and Spring, completed that year) which shows a house (the one topped by a round turret) occupying the site of this theatre.
An aerial view of this theatre from Terraserver shows a building about 120' deep with frontage of about 180' on Western Avenue. Except for the entrance foyer, the frontage looks as though it was occupied by retail shops to a depth of about 50'. The theatre auditorium looks to have been about 70' wide, and was probably about 120'-130' from screen to back wall. I’d have guessed at over 1000 seats for a place that size.
The style looks art moderne, and the building details suggest an early post-WWII construction date rather than a remodeling of something older. My grandparents lived a little more than a dozen blocks from this theatre in the 1950s, but unfortunately when we went to visit them we almost never drove down Western Avenue, and I don’t recall it. There was still quite a bit of new construction going on in the area about that time, though.
That building at far left could be a corner of the California Club, unless it’s the very back of the old Masonic Temple (fronting on Hill Street a few doors north of the College Theatre) which was demolished to make way for the temporary Hill Street Station that operated during the construction of the Subway Terminal building.
The Hill Street Station depicted in that photo was on or adjacent to the Subway Terminal building’s site, just above the middle of the block between 4th and 5th. There had been an interurban depot on that site since 1908. The depot was moved into the Subway Terminal in 1926.
That is the Biltmore beyond the auditorium. That dates the photo at no earlier than 1922. The passenger shed in the picture was demolished in 1924, replaced by a temporary structure farther south, to make way for construction of the Subway Terminal.
It turns out that the USC archive has a larger scan of the same photo.
Read more about the Hill Street Station on this page at the ERHA website.
Sorry, that was entirely the wrong link I just posted (though an interesting picture- unfortunately having nothing to do with theatres.)
The Auditorium picture is right here.
Here’s and interesting perspective on this theatre: a photo from about 1922 of the Pacific Electric’s Hill Street Station, and looming behind it are the back and side walls of the Auditorium.
So far, no photos of the Town during its first decade when it was Bard’s Hill Street Theatre have surfaced, but here is a photo from the 1910s showing the east side of Hill Street south of 4th Street. The building which A.C. Martin remodeled for Bard’s Theatre is easy to spot, being the sole one-story structure on the near block, and having a full-width awning.
This picture recently added to the L.A. Library’s on-line photo collection shows Hill Street south of 6th in what is probably the late 1920s. (The library’s information page about the photo misidentifies it as Spring Street ca1920.) At the very left can be seen part of the theatre’s marquee. Another, smaller marquee farther along the same building probably marks the entrance to the dance hall on the second floor.
My source for the September, 1963 closure, April, 1964 fire, and July, 1965 demolition of the charred ruins is an article in the Crenshaw area paper, the News-Advertiser, of July 18, 1965. Pick up a pdf scan of it from the L.A. Library. There’s a barely legible picture of a wall about to get whacked with a big ball.
The Times was right. The Mesa was at Crenshaw and Slauson in the Angeles Mesa district of Los Angeles. Crenshaw and Manchester is in Inglewood. I think the address of 8507 must be wrong. Slauson would be 58th Street if it were numbered, so maybe the first two numbers of the address got transposed when this page was set up?
In the first comment on the page vodvilnut gives a date of 1915 for the construction of this theatre, but the PSTOS page Lost Memory linked to last January gives a construction date of 1911. Both dates also appear at various other sites on the Internet. Can anybody confirm one date or the other? I know that B. Marcus Priteca designed his first Pantages Theatre (in San Francisco) in 1911. Could he have designed and gotten the Seattle house built as well in that same year?
Randall: The Seattle Pantages is here under the name Rex Theatre.
Bway: If you’re still watching this page, the photos RobertR linked to back in 2005 depict the theatre on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard which has been variously known as the Hollywood Playhouse, El Capitan Theater, Hollywood Palace, and the Avalon Hollywood, among other names. Built in 1926, it’s been a playhouse, a television studio (during which time it was the location where Richard Nixon made his famous “Checkers” speech), and a night club, but never a movie theatre. If somebody would lease it for a few months for showing films then we’d be able to give it a page here.
It just dawned on me that 223 N. Main would have been on one of the blocks razed to create the site for City Hall, so that would explain why the Principal Theatre was relocated in the mid 1920s.
The address of Miller’s Theatre was 842 S. Main Street. It was still in operation in 1924, when it and Miller’s California Theatre up the block were both taken over by Loew’s.
Miller’s Theatre can be seen at the far right (with a sunburst decorating its marquee) in this c1917 photograph from the USC digital archives. An ad for the theatre can also be seen on the wall of the tall building at the center of the picture. Before the USC site did away with its zoom feature it was possible to get a closer view of the marquee and see that it advertised “Wm. Fox Photoplays”.
Since the Sunbeam was being advertised in 1935 and Lee’s design dates only from 1937, does that mean he remodeled an old theatre, or was the old building demolished and replaced? Judging from ken mc’s recent photos it looks to me like a thoroughly 1937 vintage building.
The L.A. Library website’s California Index has three cards referencing Southwest Builder & Contractor mentions of an engineer named W.M. Bostock. Though SB&C is notorious for typos, it seldom makes the same typo in every instance. I’ve also found a Los Angeles engineer named W.M. Bostock quoted in a 1933 Time Magazine article, so it’s probable that SB&C got the name right.
As for architect L.M. Bostock, the California Index contains no references to him. If ken mc’s source was The L.A. Times, which has usually been good at keeping typos to a minimum, I’d be inclined to believe that we are dealing with two different guys and L.M. was not just a typo. If L.M. Bostock was an architect, his absence from the California Index suggests that he was a fairly obscure one. But since W.M. is only mentioned in the context of two buildings (Cinemaland and the El Sereno Theatre), I guess he’s pretty obscure himself.
Southwest Builder & Contractor’s issue of August 8, 1937, announced that S. Charles Lee had prepared plans for the theatre at Compton Avenue and 66th Street.
I see in the 1923 Paramount week ad which vokoban has posted in his Flickr collection that the address of the Principal Theatre is 223 North Main Street. It’s unlikely that Paramount would get the address of one of its theatres wrong in an ad that ran regularly, so I’d guess that either there were two Principal Theatres at different times, or the owners of the Principal Theatre moved their operation and its name from 223 N. Main to 423 N. Main sometime between 1923 and 1928.
The Gem would have been a few doors south of the Republic Theatre,a nd very close to 7th Street. It was probably a very early nickelodeon that was torn down before the Board of Trade Building was built. The northernmost storefront in the B of T had the address 443 S. Main.
The College Theatre was immediately adjacent to the old California Club building which was demolished to make way for the Title Guaranty Building.
ken mc: The theatre at 554 S. Broadway actually had the name Tally’s New Broadway displayed on it. I’m not sure that the Broadway Theatre at 428 S. ever had any connection to Tally. Cinema Treasures is the only place I’ve ever seen such a connection asserted. vokoban’s posts of information from the Times archives on Cinema Treasures' Broadway Theatre page show that it opened in 1924 or 1925 and was called (at least in the Times article) the New Broadway Theatre and that by 1926 it was being advertised merely as the Broadway Theatre, no mention of Tally in either case.
I was also wondering if L.M. and W.M. Bostock were related- or maybe the W.M. in the article I cited in 2005 was another of Southwestern Builder & Contractor’s frequent typos? There may have been only an L.M. Bostock.
No, it turns out that it’s called Chestnuts & Papaya and its business is furniture and accessory rentals for film productions.