Lux Theatre
1220 Broadway,
Oakland,
CA
94612
1220 Broadway,
Oakland,
CA
94612
1 person
favorited this theater
Showing 18 comments
The Goodwill inside the Lux has closed; the space is now vacant.
To bad the current people that have this old theatre took down the nice neon marquee. You can still go in and see It was a great little cinema in the 50 and 60’s.
saw Enter the Dragon about 10 times there when it came out!. How about “pizza pups” Does anyone remember those? A hot dog wrapped in a slice of cheese pizza then popped in a toaster over for a couple of minutes. Put a bit of mustard on when they were done and you talk about heaven! I still remember what the lady who worked the concession stand looked like. She was there for years and years.
Around 1980 I visited the Lux. It was very clean, well kept, and still had a classy 1940s look. The auditorium was packed. I watched an entertaining horror flick that took place in a carnival fun house, but didn’t stay for the second feature because the tempature was too warm and stuffy.
Here is a November 1955 ad from the Tribune:
http://tinyurl.com/n9w7ly
Here are photos from 1980 and 1986:
http://tinyurl.com/ct3ju8
http://tinyurl.com/cz5h98
The Lux Theater was between 12th and 13th streets on Broadway. Not 15th. It was relatively new theater and had a unique feature where the seats slide fore and aft about 12 inches so that you can let people squeeze by in front of you without having to stand up. I remember seeing West Point with James Cagney there.
Here is a September 1960 ad from the same paper:
http://tinyurl.com/4b5fom
Here is a 1950 ad from the Oakland Tribune:
http://tinyurl.com/yp4vhg
An ad in the Oakland Tribune on 11/24/52 puts the theater at Broadway and 15th, which is a bit at odds with the address listed above. The phone number was TW3-3786. The feature on that day was “He Walked by Night”.
I loved the Lux in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. It was an exceptionally clean and well managed second run house. Continuous showings of recent double features starting at 10:00 am with a nightly Spino game. A speaker was mounted outside so you could hear the movie soundtrack as you browsed the posters. Nice concession stand and as several people pointed out, the hot dogs were great! I would take the Key System bus from Richmond just to catch a double feature at the Lux. I think the last movie I saw there was “The Wild Bunch”. When they went to kung fu and other exploitation fare, I lost interest and heard in the final days the audiences were as rough as the movies on the screen. Every time I’m in downtown Oakland I stroll into the Goodwill store and look up at the portholes in the old projection room (now a storage area or office) and remember those pleasant days at the Lux.
Going to the Lux in Downtown Oakland in the early 70’s was a treat. It was open all night on the weekends, and had double bills of usually horror movies or kung fu style flicks. Saw “Mark of The Devil” there and they gave us free barf bags. On Saturday nights they had what was called “spino bingo” and it drew large crowds, mostly of a black audience. The snack bar was great you could buy pizza by the slice. They even sold it and all their other concessions (hot dogs were killer) from the outside at a glass window connected to the snack bar. When the lux disappeared, the old downtown feel was gone.
The Lux was the Spiz-not Back In da Day!
As noted by Gary Parks, the Lux seated 550 people.
The Lux marquee was originally to have been retained in the conversion to a Goodwill store in the mid-eighties, but some individuals from the city (there we go again!) felt that the marquee would appear as a remnant of what they felt was the “skid row” (their words, from an article about the remodeling at the time) section of Broadway. I photographed the marquee shortly before its removal, but during the daytime only. I regret never having done so at night. It was a particularly fine example, with rings and rings of horozontal neon in green, yellow, red, and white. Very shortly before its removal someone turned it on for a period—day and night.
While the theatre was vacant, a sign fastened to the attraction board said, “Theatre Available 550 seats or will remodel to suit.” So this was the accurate seating capacity at closing, most likely.
The lux had one of the prettiest marques. The front had the ticket booth and on one side there was a hot dog window. All done in shiny chrome. They had the best hot dogs.
The Lux Theatre was located at 1220 Broadway.
This theater played a lot of kung-fu and blaxploitation films in the 1970’s.