RKO Hillstreet Theatre

The April 26, 1947, issue of Boxoffice Magazine ran an article about the recent remodeling of the Hillstreet Theatre, with several photographs. The remodeling was designed by the A.B. Heinsbergen Company.

Here is a 1938 ad from the LA Times:
http://tinyurl.com/qw39a8

Here is part of an article in the LA Times on 4/29/63:

The largest theater in downtown Los Angeles closed two weeks ago-at least temporarily-with no more fanfare than was accorded its opening 41 years ago. The Hillstreet, at 8th and Hill, opened Monday afternoon March 20, 1922, with a vaudeville program and the film “Why Announce Your Marriage?” with Elaine Hammerstein. The theater closed Sunday evening April 14, 1963 with Vincent Price in “Diary of a Madman”.

Although “shortage of product” was the reason given for the theater’s closing, it is reliably estimated that at each of the last three evening performances the 2,752 seats were occupied by a tiny fraction of its capacity. Metropolitan Theater Corp., which leased the Hillstreet from the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. in 1959, said it hopes to resume regular programming when summer vacation begins for the city’s schoolchildren.

Designed by G. Albert Lansburgh, the most prolific theater architect in western United States, now living in retirement in San Mateo, the Hillstreet has an almost identical “sister” theater, the Golden Gate, in San Francisco. Though somewhat smaller than the San Francisco house, the Hillstreet has the same faintly ecclesiastical Spanish Renaissance styling. The fan-vaulted ceiling in the foyer of the Hillstreet was covered up when the entrances to both theaters were modernized on their 25th anniversaries.

Clearer copy of the 1953 photo added.

First operated by Orpheum Circuit.