Roxy Theatre
127 W. Ocean Boulevard,
Long Beach,
CA
90802
127 W. Ocean Boulevard,
Long Beach,
CA
90802
2 people
favorited this theater
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Became Roxy on October 13th, 1939. Another ad posted.
This opened as Liberty on May 15th, 1916, and renamed Stanley on August 16th, 1930. It was renamed Roxy in 1939 and started to show adult movies in 1968 until it closed in 1977. Grand opening ads posted.
Page needs to be updated with aka Strand Theatre, per previous comment by dallasmovietheaters.
Was a World War I Liberty Theatre named in 1916 and retaining it to the end of its silent era. Otis Hoyt ran it and the Strand.
Here’s the 1936 PE photo:
View link
Pity it had to resort to smut to stay open.thanks for the pictures.
In around 1936 this theatre was known as the Stanley Theatre. I found afew pictures with Pacific Electric cars passing the theatre as the Stanley. And Joe’s 1954 postcard matches the other buildings on the block.
So the site needs to add the Stanley Theatre to the aka list above.
The magazine has decided to remove its archive from Issuu, a free site, and put it on their own site, where it will be available only to paying subscribers, at $20 a month. I enjoy Boxoffice, but that’s way beyond my limited budget, and only slightly less than I now pay for access to the entire Internet. And though I miss digging up bits of information from Boxoffice, its absence has given me a lot more free time.
So he did, and in the very first comment, at that. I must have been too dazed by five o'clock in the morning to notice it.
Seeing the satellite and aerial views of Long Beach at Bing and Google maps is just flabbergasting. Practically everything I remember having been there is gone. Southern Californians used to criticize Long Beach for being dull and bland (one friend of mine used to call it Dubuque-By-the-Sea) but I always liked it (and I probably would have liked Dubuque, too.) It’s too bad that so few of its own citizens liked it enough to save more of it from the redevelopers.
The street name in the address has to be changed to Ocean Boulevard. Ocean Avenue is way over on Terminal Island, so that name misdirects the Google Maps link.
Also, I think it might have been W. Ocean Boulevard rather than E. Ocean Boulevard, but I’m not sure. Maybe somebody local will remember which direction the theater was from Pine Street.
I also came across an old photo of this theater in which the marquee bore the name Stanley, so that must have been an aka around 1940. See the movie clip titled “Pacific Electric Trolley Waltz” on this page.
I remember seeing it from the bus that ran on Ocean Boulevard back in the 60’s. It had such a simple but classic looking marquee.
Here is a September 1975 ad:
http://tinyurl.com/o39r4w
Here is a July 1975 ad from the LA Times:
http://tinyurl.com/qrqacb
Here is a 1982 photo:
http://tinyurl.com/c7fs7c
The theater in this ca. 1954 postcard must be the Roxy. Part of the name is covered by a banner of some sort, and the scan is a bit blurry, but the trapezoidal marquee fits the description by Gary Parks. I don’t recall ever seeing the place myself.
The Home Theatre was mentioned in the L.A. Times in 1925, and in Motion Picture Herald in 1932, according to cards in the California Index.
This as an early seventies ad in the LA Times. Don’t forget your marriage license:
http://tinyurl.com/2mjlv7
Here is a 1956 article from the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram:
In Long Beach after midnight the brightest lights blaze from the Palace Theater at 30 Pine Ave and the Roxy at 127 W. Ocean. They are open all night. Who are the people on the streets after midnight? What sort of people go to all-night theaters? The range of opinion on this subject is as wide as the difference between Mickey Mouse
and Mamie Van Doren.
A plainclothes officer expressed a one sided and extreme view
about the character of the night strollers. “It’s been my experience that 90 per cent of the people regularly on the streets after midnight have police records of one kind or another, if only for minor violations.” He added, “The managements of ihe theaters co-operate with authorities 100 per cent, but I can’t say as much for all of their late customers.”
The policeman’s view was quoted to Jack Feder, owner-manager of the Roxy. “He’s completely wrong!” Feder stated emphatically. “We know who our late customers are, and most of them are swing shift workers and service men. Then, too, we have restaurant and bar workers who want to relax a little before they go home. All-night theaters are under an aura of suspicion because they are open all-night. That isn’t a very good reason. Our standards are high here. We constantly turn away customers. We don’t allow drunks or rowdies and neither do we allow the Roxy to be used as a flop house. Offhand I can’t think of anything happening in an all-night theater that can’t happen in a
first-run house.”
Feder has been a resident of Long Beach for 26 years. Part of this time he traveled with George Jessel and more recently he produced network television shows in addition to operating the Roxy. “The Roxy was the first allnight theater in Long Beach and it became one because we felt the service men needed such a theater. We started keeping open all night in 1942 when there was a big storm and
thousands of sailors were stranded because they couldn’t get back to their ships”.
The Roxy in the late ‘40s and early '50s was a programmer, showing two or three films for three days, then changing the program with three new films. For a kid, it was 15c. Run down and a bit smelly, for a kid at the beach it was the perfect cocoon to while away the hours while recovering from a sunburn. I would go to the Pike (amusement park on the beach) on Mondays, the Roxy on a Tuesday, go to the beach Wednesday and the Palace up Pine on Thursday. Friday, unless we were going on a trip to L.A. or San Francisco, I would return to the Roxy for three more films. I’d average nine or ten movies a week, not counting the Fox West Coast or the State with my grandparents to see first-run films on the weekend. I have a log of many of the movies I saw…including “Green Hell” with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Bennett and Alan Hale…“Keep 'Em Flying” and “Africa Screams” with Abbott & Costello,“ and a bunch of film noir pictures that bored me. Most of the film fare was old B pictures from the late '30s and early '40s. I got a good education in film form, even from the most infantile films, which served me well in later years when I worked on "The X-Files.”
It is amazing how many theatres are named ROXY in imitation of the once famous name of the New York City panjandrum of the movie palace: Samual Lionel Rothapfel = “Roxy”. His namesake was the famous ROXY THEATRE in NYC, which outlasted him by only 25 years when it was demolished in 1960. The whole story is in that landmark book “The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace” by the late Ben M. Hall in 1961. Various editions of it are sometimes available from www.Amazon.com, but only the first edition contains the color plates.
the roxy had been the Home Theater…the old Lee threater on 4th St became and still is the Art
If memory is correct, I think the Roxy became the Art Theatre in its later days.
I can remember going there as a kid (1930’s), sitting in the small bancony with those y double couch type seats. What memories.
The Roxy Theatre seated 760 people.
This theatre was located at 127 West Ocean Avenue.