Round Up Theatre

Google has chosen to break Street View for this location, skipping the entire 5400 block of Vermont Avenue. While Google chooses to let Street View remain broken, there is a bird’s-eye view available at Bing Maps.

What is this building currently used as?

Not demolished. The Round Up’s building still stands. The L.A. County assessor’s office lists buildings at 5419 and 5425 S. Vermont. From the street they look like one building, but they are separate structures remodeled with a common facade.

The theater was in the northerly building, now using the address 5419 (probably originally the address of a store front, with another store front at 5423, and the theater’s entrance would have been between them.) It’s a 5400 square foot building erected in 1920, very likely as a theater. If you use Google Street view and look up the alley at it from 55th Street, you can see that it still has the paired rear exits characteristic of theater buildings.

Interestingly enough, the 1929 City Directory has the address listed in the Motion Picture Theatres section, but doesn’t give a theater name. Instead, it gives the personal name “Fisher W.D.” for that address. I don’t have access to city directories from earlier in the 1920s, so can’t check to see if the address was listed with a theater name then. However, it is listed in the 1936 directory as the Colonial Theatre, so there’s another aka.

Here is the 1938 city directory. The Rio is listed at 5421 S. Vermont.
http://tinyurl.com/39kgmx
http://tinyurl.com/35qpj8

Listed as the Capitol in the 1942 city directory.

One of the Robert Lippert chain of theatres.