Regent Theatre

The Regent is being renovated, possibly for live performances. Construction was ongoing when I walked by today. The auditorium has been stripped. There was a sign next to the cashier’s booth forbidding sex and alcohol in the theater, a carryover from the adult theater days.

Nothing has been done with the Regent as of today. I am in that area quite often, and usually look for any signs of renovation. The Skid Row neighborhood is gentrifying rapidly.

I did see the Regent on a 1981 episode of Hill Street Blues last night, along with the Art and the Main.

More evidence of theatres on Main Street

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Downtown developer Tom Gilmore has signed a lease agreement for the Regent Theater on the 400 block of S. Main Street, with hopes of turning the long-vacant venue into a place for small concerts and special events. Gilmore said he expects it will take about a year of renovation work before the place is ready to host any performances, adding that final plans will likely include somewhere between 375 and 475 seats. The theater is located about a block from several of Gilmore’s residential properties, which have attracted a number of groundfloor retailers and restaurants to the neighborhood, known as the Old Bank District

This theater is featured in a location shot in the 1947 movie, “The Street with no Name”, starring Richard Widmark.

One night, sometime around 1963, I accompanied two adventurous friends to the Regent Theatre. It was a grind house, serving mostly as a place for drunks to get off the street, but one of the features on their triple bill that night was a very bad (as it turned out) movie of Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans” with George Peppard. The movie had flashed through the regular theaters so fast that we had missed it, and we wanted to see it badly enough to brave a skid row grind house.

My chief memory of the place is of worn floors, peeling paint, broken seats, a barrel-vaulted ceiling of astonishing dirtiness, loud sound and surprisingly bright light from bare bulbs (both of these features apparently intended to keep the drunks from getting too comfortable), and several patrons who talked to themselves. Oh, yeah- and the smell. I mean The SMELL! The theater was in bad, bad shape.

The saddest thing, though, was that the movie was even worse than the theater. What a stinker! But what the hell. I think it only cost us fifty cents each, and we got to say that we’d been to a movie on skid row. The Regent was the only Main Street movie house I’ve ever been in, and I cherish the memory. Thanks, Regent, and so long.