A parking lot seems an incredibly low-end use for prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate, especially when it’s been no more than that for almost twenty years. But, given what Rolex charges for its watches, I guess they can afford the extravagance. Still, it seems to me that even had the main floor of the theatre been turned into retail space, as was the Beverly Theatre, it would have been a more economical use of the place.
I don’t remember Beverly Hills having a Civic Auditorium of any sort (or do they use the auditorium at the high school?) I would have thought that they would have been glad to spend a bit ( and take one small lot off the tax roles) to catch up with cities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Glendale, which have had such facilities for decades. I doubt that it would have cost very much to convert the Warner to public use. The building appeared to have been well maintained through the years. When even the small city of San Gabriel has managed to operate a 1500 seat municipal auditorium for ages now, (and San Gabriel probably doesn’t have even a tenth of the wealth that is concentrated in Beverly Hills), it really is a shame that they didn’t make the effort to save at least this one theatre, which could have provided so much benefit to the city.
The last time I was in the neighborhood was 1986, so I don’t know anything about the changes since then, other than what I’ve been told about, or have seen at the Old Town web site. But in 1986, almost every building on the block from Fair Oaks to DeLacy and from Colorado to Union was empty, and had been for many years. The area north of Union had already been demolished to make way for the big parking garage of Parsons Engineering Company.
Most of the block had by that time been bought up by a single developer, who may be the same one who eventually did the renovations, I don’t know. But when I first began to frequent the area, about 1960, it was fairly run down but still lively. The Fox had closed only a few years before, and had become the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, which also occupied the retail store on the corner of DeLacy. There was a fire door between the theater lobby and the corner store, and that was kept open all the time. The theater was still recognizable as such, though openings had been cut in the wall between lobby and auditorium, at about window height. The balcony was still there, but the stairs were roped off. The stage and proscenium were still there, too.
The rest of the block along Colorado had a number of thrift shops, a well-known used book store called Broughton’s, which was right across the alley from the theater, a large barber college, a couple of other shops I can’t recall details of, and, on the corner of Fair Oaks, in what had once been an Owl Rexall Drug Store, there was a low-priced lunchroom which seemed to change owners and names every couple of years. The best incarnation of the place was called The Family Barbecue Pit, owned and operated by a local African-American family. It was the best barbecue place in the San Gabriel Valley. The upper floors of the buildings along the block were either offices or apartments, and most of them appeared to still be occupied, even into the early 1970s.
Going up Fair Oaks, there were more thrift shops, a barber shop, a dive bar, and on the corner of Union, an unclaimed freight outlet, crammed from floor to ceiling with old trunks, suitcases, and shipping crates of all shapes and sizes. I think there was an old hotel above one of the buildings- the one with the bar in it, I believe.
I don’t have as detailed a memory of the Union Street side of the block, but I think it was mostly small workshops and warehouses, and maybe an automobile repair garage. Few of the buildings along either side of that block of Union Street had been built for retail uses. They were mostly one story brick buildings. I don’t remember any parking lot there at all in the 1960s.
The interior of the block did have real alleys in it. I was only in the one alongside the theater and the one behind Colorado Boulevard, once, when I was helping a friend load some boxes of books he had bought at Broughton’s into his car. As I recall, it was fairly tight back there, but I think that at least one of the buildings on the Union Street side must not have gone all the way back to the alley, because I remember being able to see the side wall of the theater’s stage house unobstructed.
I don’t know exactly where the plaza and the Laemmle building are, but I know that the block was solidly built up in those days, mostly with two story buildings except on the Union Street side. The last time I saw it was, of course, before the Whittier Narrows earthquake, which I know did some serious damage to many buildings in the area, so I can easily imagine some of the old buildings along Union Street being knocked down by it. I’m sure they were all unreinforced brick, and had wooden truss roofs, and few interior walls, or none at all in some cases. That particular type of building is pretty weak in an earthquake. If they were knocked down, their brick might have been used in the new construction, helping any new buildings to blend in with the others. But I don’t know for sure.
I am thinking now that, given the original name of the theatre, and the look of the original facade, the archtectural style of the State must have been that particular subset of Italian Renaissance called Florentine.
Shouldn’t this theatre be listed as being in North Hollywood rather than just the general area San Fernando Valley? Or maybe all the theatres in places like North Hollywood, Reseda, Chatsworth, Van Nuys, etc, should be listed together as being in the San Fernando Valley? It ought to be one or the other, though, just to keep things consistent.
Somewhere around my house I have a copy of a magazine from about 1930, called Creative Art. It is an issue devoted to architecture and planning in New York City, and it contains sketches of early proposals for the Rockefeller Center site. At least one sketch does feature a new house for the Metropolitan Opera as the centerpiece of the design.
In another proposal, there would have been a 100' wide avenue opened about midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, to have run from 42nd Street to Central Park. The new opera house would have fronted on this thoroughfare. Hardly any of the proposals featured in the magazine ever got built. Instead, there was Robert Moses.
Oh, OK. I only read Benjamin’s recent comment after I posted this question. D'OH! There is my answer. The Center. I’ll be sure to read the latest comments in a thread before posting questions in the future.
Perhaps someone who is familiar with Rockefeller Center can answer a question for me. Many years ago I saw in a book, the name of which I can’t remember, a photograph of a theatre in, or very near, Radio City- a third theatre, besides the Music Hall and the small news theatre which I believe was later called the Guild. This third theatre was a good sized place- 1500 seats, if I recall. It was closed long ago, and the space it had occupied was filled in with floors of offices.
I’ve looked through the New York City theatre listings on this site and can’t find it among them. I don’t remember the name, but I think it must have been operated by RKO. Does anyone know anything about this vanished theatre? I think that its men’s lounge was decorated with aviation-themed photographs by a famous photographer of the 1930s, but that’s about all I can remember of it. Did I just imagine the whole thing?
I attended movies at many of Southern California’s grand old movie palaces in the 1960s, but there was always something special about the Warner Beverly. It had, and was surrounded by, an air of elegance and sophistication, almost as though it had somehow remained suspended in an earlier age while most of the other theatres had been caught in the tides of change and had fetched up on the tatty shores of the more modern world, surrounded by McDonald’s franchises and discount stores.
The last time I passed by the Warner was in the mid-1980s. I had impulsively taken a bus jaunt to Santa Monica, and, on the way back to Los Angeles, I noticed that the bus was full of hippies, by then a rare species. I wondered at the oddity, and this sudden feeling of displacement in time. Then, at the bus stop near the theatre, the hippies all disembarked, which seemed to me even stranger than their presence. What on earth could they be doing in Beverly Hills? Then we passed the Warner, and I saw the marquee. The Grateful Dead were playing a concert there! I think that this must have been one of the last events the theatre ever hosted.
But even at that late date, the facade of the Warner was still splendid. It looked as though it would last forever. When I heard, only recently, that it had been demolished, I could scarcely believe it. It is very sad that the City of Beverly Hills could not save this marvelous gem.
I’ve come across an interesting reference to the source of this theatre’s original name. An article in the Los Angeles Examiner of February 17th, 1925, announced that Mark Hansen and Alice Calhoun had formed a partnership to finance a new theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The name of the new theater, the Marcal, was created from a combination of parts of their names.
This brings to a total of three the number of theatre names (that I know of) in the Los Angeles area which were created in this way. The Garmar Theatre in Montebello was named after the owner’s sons, Gary and Mark, and the three Meralta Theatres, in Culver City, Los Angeles and Downey, were named by combining parts of the surnames of their original operators, the sisters Pearl Merrill and Laura Peralta.
I wonder how many other unusual theatre names were constructed in this way?
I have only just realized, looking at the photograph, that I went to this theatre once. I was about six years old. We were visiting friends of my parents who lived in Burbank, one Saturday afternoon. The adults decided to send all of us kids off to the movies for the afternoon. I remember that there were multiple cartoons, and that one of the movies on the double bill was Disney’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The pumpkin scared the hell out of me. I remember coming out of the theatre after the show, and seeing the blinding afternoon sunlight of a hot summer day glinting off the marquee. The Cornell must have been only about two or three years old then. It was a splendid theatre. How sad to know that it’s gone.
Located only a mile or so east of the lower end of the downtown theater district, the Hub would have been part of a very different, but still lively neighborhood. Transformed from an area of small farms, orchards and vineyards late in the 19th century, by 1920 the several hundred acres east of downtown had become a thriving and diverse area of small shops, factories, warehouses, hotels, wholesale markets, apartments, Victorian dwellings, churches, schools, and all the amenities of an early 20th century city neighborhood. The address of this theatre places it a block south of the Pacific Electric Interurban line which ran to Watts, Huntington Park, Long Beach, and Orange County, where it ran along Ninth Street. Local Streetcar service was also present in the area, provided by the L.A. Railway. The Hub was located less than half a mile south of what, before the construction of Union Station, was the main depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
With the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union, some parts of this extensive collection of small neighborhoods, so conveniently situated near the railroad yards at which the passenger cars were maintained and serviced, became the place where many of the union’s prosperous members chose to establish their homes. They were the kings of the city’s still fairly small Black community, and this stretch of Central Avenue became the community’s first main street.
Some of my older relatives have told me of passing though this neighborhood in the 1920s, during its most prosperous years, before the depression. It was a very lively place. No air of its faded glamour still clung to it in the late 1950s, when I first saw it. The liveliest part of Central Avenue had by then shifted far to the south, below Adams Boulevard. Most of the houses along the once tree-shaded streets had by then been displaced by the expanding industrial district, but a scattered few still stood, and the shops and restaurants of the area catered mostly to the stream of daily workers from other neighborhoods who filled the factories, and they closed early unless they were very close to one of the wholesale markets which were busy all night.
I would like to have seen the place in earlier times, when the Hub’s marquee must have shone brightly above the passing throngs of Friday and Saturday night revelers, and its seats filled with moviegoers. Not only has this theatre vanished, but the entire neighborhood of which it was a part has gone, too.
Having checked the recent aerial image of this theater’s likely location, (at Terraserver, search on 703 S.Braodway, Los Angeles, CA, location of Loew’s State), the building in question, immediately west of the alley behind the State, does indeed appear to be a low structure of no more that two floors, with a frontage of perhaps sixty feet on Seventh Street and a depth of about 120 feet. As it is unlikely that any building put up on that lot in the last eighty years would have been a mere two story structure, this is quite likely the same building once occupied by the first Palace Theater, and vacated by it more than 84 years ago.
Perhaps someone who remembers the Fox Figueroa can clear up something for me. I have only one vivid memory of this theatre, but it is from very early, when I was no more then six or seven years old, and I’m not sure it is accurate. I remember that we were driving along one or the other of the streets on which the Figueroa was located, on a Saturday afternoon, and I saw a large crowd of people waiting at the box office. The image I have in my mind is that the theatre was set back quite a way from one street, or both of them, so there was a sort of plaza at the corner of the intersection. It also seems to me that the theatre building was “L” shaped, partly enclosing this area. But maybe it was just a very wide sidewalk on that block, and a narrower sidewalk on the next block down. The pictures of the theatre that I’ve seen are all closeups, so they don’t tell me if my image of the place is accurate. Does anyone remember the way the Figueroa was situated on its corner?
As a warning to anyone who may go looking for information about the first Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, I have noticed a discrepancy in the address posted for it in different sections of the L.A. Public Library’s online data base. on many text pages in the photo database, the address is given as 125 S. Main Street, though there is at least one photograph of the Grand the accompanying text page for which identifies it as the home of the first Orpheum, and it is a certainty that the Grand was at 110 S. Main. Other sections of the database also clearly identify the Grand as the theater which the Orpheum Circuit leased for its first Los Angeles theater, and give the correct address. I have sent an e-mail to the L.A. Public Library informing them of the repeated error in their photo database, but thus far I have received no acknowledging reply, and there has been no correction made to their web site.
I checked the location with Terraserver, and found my memory of the area confirmed The site if the theater is now occupied by a large office building (probably built in the 1920s.) The server won’t recognize the address 311 S.Spring, but does fetch 315. The building occupies the entire corner of the block, all the way to 3rd Street. There are very few small buildings from before the 1920s era left on Spring Street, which was for decades the main financial district of Los Angeles, lined mainly with banks and corporate offices, and a few hotels. Most of the banks and corporate headquarters have departed these buildings, but it is still a splendid collection of mostly 1920s-1930s architecture, though much of it lies vacant.
I have searched on Terraserver for the address 5002 W.Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, and the fairly recent USGS aerial photograph of the area displayed shows a building at that address which certainly looks as though it once housed a theater. I have not been able to find what the current use of the building might be.
The Mission Theater is mentioned in the March 6th, 1913, issue of Builder and Contractor. An addition to increase seating capacity was being built at that time. 1912 would probably be the latest date at which the original part of the theater was built. But, when dealing with buildings in Santa Barbara, it’s useful to remember that much of the town was destroyed in the earthquake of 1925, and many buildings had to be entirely rebuilt, so that it’s possible that nothing remains of the original construction. Other buildings survived, but were then, or in subsequent years, extensively remodeled to conform to the Spanish-Mission style which the city officially mandated for new construction after the earthquake. Thus, part, or none of this building may date to 1912 or earlier, and the Spanish style front most likely dates to the mid-1920s or later.
A Glendale Press article of July 20th, 1923, commented on the Egyptian style decor of the Gateway Theater. It had opened on July 2nd of that year.
A Southwest Builder and Contractor article in the issue of November 17th, 1922 had announced that the one story and part two story brick building would be built by the Winter Construction Company, and that the owner of the building was F.A. Miller. The building was 80x160 feet, and would cost an estimated $55,000.
The earliest reference to a theater in Downey that I’ve found is from a November 7th, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. The theater mentioned as being then in the planning stage is not named, and neither its size nor its exact location is mentioned in my source, (which is not the magazine itself, but an index card in the L.A. Library’s online regional history database), but the plans were being dawn by architect Harry Haden Whiteley, and construction was being financed by Hogan Willeford. I believe that this was most likely the house that came to be named the Downey Theatre. Whether or not it is the same theater that later became El Teatro I don’t know.
I was thinking that if Nederlander, or anyone else, wants to mount Broadway-style shows in the theater, they would need to return the stage house to its original use. The lack of a proper stage house would probably prevent the theater from being fully usable as a performing arts center.
If the Lido does have to be removed, I do hope they document it fully first.
I am wondering what became of the Lido Theatre, designed by Cliff Balch and built into the stage house of the Fox in 1941 or 1942, as a distinct theatre with its own entrance and lobby located in former shop space. Is it still there? If it is, and the Fox is to be restored for live performances, the Lido will have to be removed. This theater is not posted on Cinema Treasures. Does anyone have a description of it?
If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.
A parking lot seems an incredibly low-end use for prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate, especially when it’s been no more than that for almost twenty years. But, given what Rolex charges for its watches, I guess they can afford the extravagance. Still, it seems to me that even had the main floor of the theatre been turned into retail space, as was the Beverly Theatre, it would have been a more economical use of the place.
I don’t remember Beverly Hills having a Civic Auditorium of any sort (or do they use the auditorium at the high school?) I would have thought that they would have been glad to spend a bit ( and take one small lot off the tax roles) to catch up with cities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Glendale, which have had such facilities for decades. I doubt that it would have cost very much to convert the Warner to public use. The building appeared to have been well maintained through the years. When even the small city of San Gabriel has managed to operate a 1500 seat municipal auditorium for ages now, (and San Gabriel probably doesn’t have even a tenth of the wealth that is concentrated in Beverly Hills), it really is a shame that they didn’t make the effort to save at least this one theatre, which could have provided so much benefit to the city.
EJ:
The last time I was in the neighborhood was 1986, so I don’t know anything about the changes since then, other than what I’ve been told about, or have seen at the Old Town web site. But in 1986, almost every building on the block from Fair Oaks to DeLacy and from Colorado to Union was empty, and had been for many years. The area north of Union had already been demolished to make way for the big parking garage of Parsons Engineering Company.
Most of the block had by that time been bought up by a single developer, who may be the same one who eventually did the renovations, I don’t know. But when I first began to frequent the area, about 1960, it was fairly run down but still lively. The Fox had closed only a few years before, and had become the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, which also occupied the retail store on the corner of DeLacy. There was a fire door between the theater lobby and the corner store, and that was kept open all the time. The theater was still recognizable as such, though openings had been cut in the wall between lobby and auditorium, at about window height. The balcony was still there, but the stairs were roped off. The stage and proscenium were still there, too.
The rest of the block along Colorado had a number of thrift shops, a well-known used book store called Broughton’s, which was right across the alley from the theater, a large barber college, a couple of other shops I can’t recall details of, and, on the corner of Fair Oaks, in what had once been an Owl Rexall Drug Store, there was a low-priced lunchroom which seemed to change owners and names every couple of years. The best incarnation of the place was called The Family Barbecue Pit, owned and operated by a local African-American family. It was the best barbecue place in the San Gabriel Valley. The upper floors of the buildings along the block were either offices or apartments, and most of them appeared to still be occupied, even into the early 1970s.
Going up Fair Oaks, there were more thrift shops, a barber shop, a dive bar, and on the corner of Union, an unclaimed freight outlet, crammed from floor to ceiling with old trunks, suitcases, and shipping crates of all shapes and sizes. I think there was an old hotel above one of the buildings- the one with the bar in it, I believe.
I don’t have as detailed a memory of the Union Street side of the block, but I think it was mostly small workshops and warehouses, and maybe an automobile repair garage. Few of the buildings along either side of that block of Union Street had been built for retail uses. They were mostly one story brick buildings. I don’t remember any parking lot there at all in the 1960s.
The interior of the block did have real alleys in it. I was only in the one alongside the theater and the one behind Colorado Boulevard, once, when I was helping a friend load some boxes of books he had bought at Broughton’s into his car. As I recall, it was fairly tight back there, but I think that at least one of the buildings on the Union Street side must not have gone all the way back to the alley, because I remember being able to see the side wall of the theater’s stage house unobstructed.
I don’t know exactly where the plaza and the Laemmle building are, but I know that the block was solidly built up in those days, mostly with two story buildings except on the Union Street side. The last time I saw it was, of course, before the Whittier Narrows earthquake, which I know did some serious damage to many buildings in the area, so I can easily imagine some of the old buildings along Union Street being knocked down by it. I’m sure they were all unreinforced brick, and had wooden truss roofs, and few interior walls, or none at all in some cases. That particular type of building is pretty weak in an earthquake. If they were knocked down, their brick might have been used in the new construction, helping any new buildings to blend in with the others. But I don’t know for sure.
I am thinking now that, given the original name of the theatre, and the look of the original facade, the archtectural style of the State must have been that particular subset of Italian Renaissance called Florentine.
Shouldn’t this theatre be listed as being in North Hollywood rather than just the general area San Fernando Valley? Or maybe all the theatres in places like North Hollywood, Reseda, Chatsworth, Van Nuys, etc, should be listed together as being in the San Fernando Valley? It ought to be one or the other, though, just to keep things consistent.
Somewhere around my house I have a copy of a magazine from about 1930, called Creative Art. It is an issue devoted to architecture and planning in New York City, and it contains sketches of early proposals for the Rockefeller Center site. At least one sketch does feature a new house for the Metropolitan Opera as the centerpiece of the design.
In another proposal, there would have been a 100' wide avenue opened about midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, to have run from 42nd Street to Central Park. The new opera house would have fronted on this thoroughfare. Hardly any of the proposals featured in the magazine ever got built. Instead, there was Robert Moses.
Heh. I should have known! I think I might have dated one of them!
Oh, OK. I only read Benjamin’s recent comment after I posted this question. D'OH! There is my answer. The Center. I’ll be sure to read the latest comments in a thread before posting questions in the future.
Perhaps someone who is familiar with Rockefeller Center can answer a question for me. Many years ago I saw in a book, the name of which I can’t remember, a photograph of a theatre in, or very near, Radio City- a third theatre, besides the Music Hall and the small news theatre which I believe was later called the Guild. This third theatre was a good sized place- 1500 seats, if I recall. It was closed long ago, and the space it had occupied was filled in with floors of offices.
I’ve looked through the New York City theatre listings on this site and can’t find it among them. I don’t remember the name, but I think it must have been operated by RKO. Does anyone know anything about this vanished theatre? I think that its men’s lounge was decorated with aviation-themed photographs by a famous photographer of the 1930s, but that’s about all I can remember of it. Did I just imagine the whole thing?
I attended movies at many of Southern California’s grand old movie palaces in the 1960s, but there was always something special about the Warner Beverly. It had, and was surrounded by, an air of elegance and sophistication, almost as though it had somehow remained suspended in an earlier age while most of the other theatres had been caught in the tides of change and had fetched up on the tatty shores of the more modern world, surrounded by McDonald’s franchises and discount stores.
The last time I passed by the Warner was in the mid-1980s. I had impulsively taken a bus jaunt to Santa Monica, and, on the way back to Los Angeles, I noticed that the bus was full of hippies, by then a rare species. I wondered at the oddity, and this sudden feeling of displacement in time. Then, at the bus stop near the theatre, the hippies all disembarked, which seemed to me even stranger than their presence. What on earth could they be doing in Beverly Hills? Then we passed the Warner, and I saw the marquee. The Grateful Dead were playing a concert there! I think that this must have been one of the last events the theatre ever hosted.
But even at that late date, the facade of the Warner was still splendid. It looked as though it would last forever. When I heard, only recently, that it had been demolished, I could scarcely believe it. It is very sad that the City of Beverly Hills could not save this marvelous gem.
I’ve come across an interesting reference to the source of this theatre’s original name. An article in the Los Angeles Examiner of February 17th, 1925, announced that Mark Hansen and Alice Calhoun had formed a partnership to finance a new theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The name of the new theater, the Marcal, was created from a combination of parts of their names.
This brings to a total of three the number of theatre names (that I know of) in the Los Angeles area which were created in this way. The Garmar Theatre in Montebello was named after the owner’s sons, Gary and Mark, and the three Meralta Theatres, in Culver City, Los Angeles and Downey, were named by combining parts of the surnames of their original operators, the sisters Pearl Merrill and Laura Peralta.
I wonder how many other unusual theatre names were constructed in this way?
I have only just realized, looking at the photograph, that I went to this theatre once. I was about six years old. We were visiting friends of my parents who lived in Burbank, one Saturday afternoon. The adults decided to send all of us kids off to the movies for the afternoon. I remember that there were multiple cartoons, and that one of the movies on the double bill was Disney’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The pumpkin scared the hell out of me. I remember coming out of the theatre after the show, and seeing the blinding afternoon sunlight of a hot summer day glinting off the marquee. The Cornell must have been only about two or three years old then. It was a splendid theatre. How sad to know that it’s gone.
Located only a mile or so east of the lower end of the downtown theater district, the Hub would have been part of a very different, but still lively neighborhood. Transformed from an area of small farms, orchards and vineyards late in the 19th century, by 1920 the several hundred acres east of downtown had become a thriving and diverse area of small shops, factories, warehouses, hotels, wholesale markets, apartments, Victorian dwellings, churches, schools, and all the amenities of an early 20th century city neighborhood. The address of this theatre places it a block south of the Pacific Electric Interurban line which ran to Watts, Huntington Park, Long Beach, and Orange County, where it ran along Ninth Street. Local Streetcar service was also present in the area, provided by the L.A. Railway. The Hub was located less than half a mile south of what, before the construction of Union Station, was the main depot of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
With the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union, some parts of this extensive collection of small neighborhoods, so conveniently situated near the railroad yards at which the passenger cars were maintained and serviced, became the place where many of the union’s prosperous members chose to establish their homes. They were the kings of the city’s still fairly small Black community, and this stretch of Central Avenue became the community’s first main street.
Some of my older relatives have told me of passing though this neighborhood in the 1920s, during its most prosperous years, before the depression. It was a very lively place. No air of its faded glamour still clung to it in the late 1950s, when I first saw it. The liveliest part of Central Avenue had by then shifted far to the south, below Adams Boulevard. Most of the houses along the once tree-shaded streets had by then been displaced by the expanding industrial district, but a scattered few still stood, and the shops and restaurants of the area catered mostly to the stream of daily workers from other neighborhoods who filled the factories, and they closed early unless they were very close to one of the wholesale markets which were busy all night.
I would like to have seen the place in earlier times, when the Hub’s marquee must have shone brightly above the passing throngs of Friday and Saturday night revelers, and its seats filled with moviegoers. Not only has this theatre vanished, but the entire neighborhood of which it was a part has gone, too.
Having checked the recent aerial image of this theater’s likely location, (at Terraserver, search on 703 S.Braodway, Los Angeles, CA, location of Loew’s State), the building in question, immediately west of the alley behind the State, does indeed appear to be a low structure of no more that two floors, with a frontage of perhaps sixty feet on Seventh Street and a depth of about 120 feet. As it is unlikely that any building put up on that lot in the last eighty years would have been a mere two story structure, this is quite likely the same building once occupied by the first Palace Theater, and vacated by it more than 84 years ago.
Perhaps someone who remembers the Fox Figueroa can clear up something for me. I have only one vivid memory of this theatre, but it is from very early, when I was no more then six or seven years old, and I’m not sure it is accurate. I remember that we were driving along one or the other of the streets on which the Figueroa was located, on a Saturday afternoon, and I saw a large crowd of people waiting at the box office. The image I have in my mind is that the theatre was set back quite a way from one street, or both of them, so there was a sort of plaza at the corner of the intersection. It also seems to me that the theatre building was “L” shaped, partly enclosing this area. But maybe it was just a very wide sidewalk on that block, and a narrower sidewalk on the next block down. The pictures of the theatre that I’ve seen are all closeups, so they don’t tell me if my image of the place is accurate. Does anyone remember the way the Figueroa was situated on its corner?
As a warning to anyone who may go looking for information about the first Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, I have noticed a discrepancy in the address posted for it in different sections of the L.A. Public Library’s online data base. on many text pages in the photo database, the address is given as 125 S. Main Street, though there is at least one photograph of the Grand the accompanying text page for which identifies it as the home of the first Orpheum, and it is a certainty that the Grand was at 110 S. Main. Other sections of the database also clearly identify the Grand as the theater which the Orpheum Circuit leased for its first Los Angeles theater, and give the correct address. I have sent an e-mail to the L.A. Public Library informing them of the repeated error in their photo database, but thus far I have received no acknowledging reply, and there has been no correction made to their web site.
Bway:
I checked the location with Terraserver, and found my memory of the area confirmed The site if the theater is now occupied by a large office building (probably built in the 1920s.) The server won’t recognize the address 311 S.Spring, but does fetch 315. The building occupies the entire corner of the block, all the way to 3rd Street. There are very few small buildings from before the 1920s era left on Spring Street, which was for decades the main financial district of Los Angeles, lined mainly with banks and corporate offices, and a few hotels. Most of the banks and corporate headquarters have departed these buildings, but it is still a splendid collection of mostly 1920s-1930s architecture, though much of it lies vacant.
I have searched on Terraserver for the address 5002 W.Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, and the fairly recent USGS aerial photograph of the area displayed shows a building at that address which certainly looks as though it once housed a theater. I have not been able to find what the current use of the building might be.
The Mission Theater is mentioned in the March 6th, 1913, issue of Builder and Contractor. An addition to increase seating capacity was being built at that time. 1912 would probably be the latest date at which the original part of the theater was built. But, when dealing with buildings in Santa Barbara, it’s useful to remember that much of the town was destroyed in the earthquake of 1925, and many buildings had to be entirely rebuilt, so that it’s possible that nothing remains of the original construction. Other buildings survived, but were then, or in subsequent years, extensively remodeled to conform to the Spanish-Mission style which the city officially mandated for new construction after the earthquake. Thus, part, or none of this building may date to 1912 or earlier, and the Spanish style front most likely dates to the mid-1920s or later.
A Glendale Press article of July 20th, 1923, commented on the Egyptian style decor of the Gateway Theater. It had opened on July 2nd of that year.
A Southwest Builder and Contractor article in the issue of November 17th, 1922 had announced that the one story and part two story brick building would be built by the Winter Construction Company, and that the owner of the building was F.A. Miller. The building was 80x160 feet, and would cost an estimated $55,000.
The earliest reference to a theater in Downey that I’ve found is from a November 7th, 1919 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. The theater mentioned as being then in the planning stage is not named, and neither its size nor its exact location is mentioned in my source, (which is not the magazine itself, but an index card in the L.A. Library’s online regional history database), but the plans were being dawn by architect Harry Haden Whiteley, and construction was being financed by Hogan Willeford. I believe that this was most likely the house that came to be named the Downey Theatre. Whether or not it is the same theater that later became El Teatro I don’t know.
I was thinking that if Nederlander, or anyone else, wants to mount Broadway-style shows in the theater, they would need to return the stage house to its original use. The lack of a proper stage house would probably prevent the theater from being fully usable as a performing arts center.
If the Lido does have to be removed, I do hope they document it fully first.
I am wondering what became of the Lido Theatre, designed by Cliff Balch and built into the stage house of the Fox in 1941 or 1942, as a distinct theatre with its own entrance and lobby located in former shop space. Is it still there? If it is, and the Fox is to be restored for live performances, the Lido will have to be removed. This theater is not posted on Cinema Treasures. Does anyone have a description of it?
If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.