Bill Robinson Theatre

Worked this theater briefly during a revival, and ran a bunch of “Hammer” Horror Films that were popular in the lated sixties. The theater was like the Rio, and didn’t stay open very long on its second go round.

Los Angeleno: The theater on Central at Jefferson is listed at Cinema Treasures as the Florence Mills Theatre. It is the oldest of the three theaters you mention, having been erected in 1912, and known to have been operating as the Globe Theatre in 1914.

The Robinson theater was located on Central Ave, between 43rd St. and 43rd Pl. on the west side of the street. Directly across the street from the Los Angeles Sentinel news paper, Civic meat market, and Lucy’s Supermarket.

As a small child, my family took me to the Robinson Theater to see Ben Hur. It was our neighborhood theater. As a young boy, I got a job cleaning and stacking bricks that were the remains of the demolished theater. Both the Robinson Theater, and the Dunbar Hotel were our pyramids of Giza, monuments of a civilization that had long since become passed away.

Oh Bill Robinson, where have you gone…lost in San Jacinto.

Soboba was the original name of the theatre, probably named after the Soboba band of Luiseno Indians. There is also a Soboba Hot Springs in the area. The name Sabada has no local associations that I can find. It seems most likely that the FDY was in error.

My source for the opening date and closing year, as well as the correct name and the building’s destruction by fire, is the California Index at the L.A. Library website. Here are two cards citing the L.A. Times:

View link

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I’m not sure if the Soboba was the same theatre as the San Jacinto, but it seems likely. In the 1950s, San Jacinto was still a very small town and it was rather isolated. I doubt it would have supported two theatres.

The photo to which Lost Memory linked above confirms that the theatre ran movies. The marquee advertises the 1946 film Murder in the Music Hall with Vera Hruba Ralston and William Marshall.

Lost Memory: The pueblo style theatre in San Jacinto was called the Soboba. It opened on September 9, 1927 and closed in 1951. The building was destroyed by fire in December of 1968. Here’s another photo, dated 1936, before the movie-style marquee was added.

Here is a June 2007 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/26ej45

There is a small photo of the marquee of the Bill Robinson Theatre on this page at the Western States Black History and Research Center website. It’s part of a large collection of photos and memorabilia assembled by the late Mayme A. Clayton. Eventually there’s to be a library to house the collection, but so far only a few pictures have been digitized for display on the website.

I’m not sure which of the two locations of the Bill Robinson is depicted in this photo, but it is labeled as having been taken c1942, so it’s more likely to be the former Tivoli Theatre at 4219 Central Avenue than the former Casino Theatre (which is not yet listed at Cinema Treasures) at 4319 Central Avenue.

This theatre would have been near or adjacent to the historic Dunbar Hotel, located at 4225 S. Central Avenue. In the days when the major Los Angeles hotels were segregated, the Dunbar was the place where most African-American celebrities and entertainers stayed when making appearances in the city. Central Avenue was the location of many night clubs and restaurants, as well as several movie theatres. The Dunbar Hotel building survives, having been renovated and converted to residential apartments a number of years ago.

Another interesting tidbit about the theatre: a biographical sketch of actor and singer Herb Jeffries (“The Bronze Buckaroo”) mentions that in 1938 he was one of the performers featured in an all-black radio show which originated from the Bill Robinson Theatre on Central Avenue and was broadcast over station KFOX.

The lively entertainment district which once thrived on Central Avenue was entirely gone by the 1970s. The neighborhood had grown very poor by then, and had been deserted even by the chain drug stores and markets. A few historic buildings remained, but the place was dispirited and dangerous. It’s probably best that you didn’t go exploring there at that time.

I notice that, directly under their listing of the Casino, the have a theater called the “Cirole.” I wonder if that could be a misspelling of “Circle?” There was definitely a Circle Theater in Los Angeles in that era, also designed by Smith, located at 60th and Moneta Avenue (later renamed South Broadway.)

And, on the subject of coincidence, before I got your reply here, I had minutes before made a comment about the Circle on the Cinema Treasures entry for the Aloha Theater, at 60th and Broadway, which may in fact have been the Circle.

As for the address coincidence on Central Avenue, many of the neighborhood theaters built in Los Angeles in that era were of a fairly standard form, with a couple of shops either side of the lobby entrance, and sometimes a door to an upper floor of offices or apartments. A great many theaters built at intersections thus had addresses ending in a number in the teens, so the odds of two theaters a block apart on the same side of a street having a number ending in 19 were probably one in five.