The details on the outside of the Golden Gate look more Renaissance-Baroque than anything else to me. The interior is similar to the original interior of Lansburgh’s Hillstreet Theatre in Los Angeles, which had an predominantly Gothic style in both its auditorium and other areas, until it got a remodel in the late 1940s.
But Lansburgh did put these Gothic elements into a highly classicized framework, which made the auditoriums look almost like Renaissance designs with Gothic detailing. The Golden Gate’s auditorium seems to me to have a strong Venetian Gothic influence, though, while the Hillstreet has overall more eccentric features that are hard to pin down as any particular sort of Gothic. I think Albert may have been on the pipe when he designed the Hillstreet.
It’s often difficult to classify movie theatres according to standard styles as they are usually defined by architecture critics, because so many palace architects mixed together various elements of various styles from different periods or different cultures, and sometimes added novel and unprecedented stylistic flourishes of their own invention. Plus it’s not uncommon for the interior style of a theatre and the exterior style of its building to differ, even when they were designed by the same architect.
Because of their eclecticism, and their frequently fantastical stylistic elements, I don’t think we’ll ever get a truly precise nomenclature for describing movie theatre architecture. Way too many theatres were sui generis.
This theatre was opened by Joseph Corwin, founder of the Metropolitan Theatres circuit. Metropolitan’s page says that Joseph Corwin opened the Broadway, his first theatre in Los Angeles, in 1923. Thus it was always operated by Metropolitan, and was never Tally’s New Broadway.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only “New Broadway” theatre that ever existed on Broadway was Tally’s New Broadway Theatre at Broadway near 6th, which is the one listed at Cinema Treasures as the Garnett Theatre. That the Garnett was called Tally’s New Broadway is undeniable from the photographic evidence.
We haven’t pinned down the opening year for the Garnett/Tally’s New Broadway yet. From this photograph at the USC Archives we can see that the theatre pre-dated the Story Building on the SE corner of 6th and Broadway, on which construction began in 1908.
This theatre definitely predates the oldest surviving theatre on Broadway, the Cameo, which opened in 1910 as Clune’s Broadway. As far as Tally’s being the first movie theatre built on Broadway, it’s quite possible, though it’s also possible that a storefront nickelodeon or two opened earlier.
The large version of the ca.1909 photo of the theatre linked by kenmc on Oct. 6 2006 has moved. It’s here now. Noting the decoration along the top of the structure, it appears that Tally’s and Silverwood’s shared the same building. Silverwood’s at first occupied only a corner spot, and eventually expanded to occupy the entire building (ca.1913). By the 1920s they were in the multi-story building which remains on that site today.
From the Oakland Library, via the Online Archive of California, here is College Avenue in 1930, the Uptown Theatre in the distance (photo is highly zoom-able, so you can get a decent, though oblique, look at the front.)
The assessor’s information for this address is reported as part of a bundle, with the addresses 1232, 1234, 1236 and 1238 W. 7th. Street included. On a parcel of 11,717 sq. ft., there are said to be four buildings, but information for only one building is included on the assessor’s report, and that one is a structure of 8697 sq. ft., built in 1913.
The Playhouse is among the movie theatres listed in a 1914 ad reproduced on this L.A. Times blog page. A TerraServer satellite view of the location shows a building that looks as though it might have been a theatre. If somebody could check this one out, I think they might find that the Playhouse hasn’t been demolished after all.
Here is a 1959 photo of MacDonald Avenue at night, with the Fox Theatre (formerly the Costa) on the left. The U.A.’s marquee would have been in the foreground on the right, but this picture was apparently taken when the theatre was being remodeled into a Woolworth store. The building is covered in scaffolding, the vertical sign is gone, and the marquee looks to have been rounded off for Woolworth’s use.
During WWII, when Richmond’s population boomed due to the development of the Kaiser shipyards, photographer Dorothea Lange took hundreds of photos of the city. A large selection of these pictures are now available in digital form from the Online Archive of California. While most of the photos were related to the shipyards and their workers, a number depicted McDonald Avenue and, among those, a few of the street’s movie houses appeared.
So far I haven’t seen any photos of the Costa/Fox in the collection, but there are few pictures of the earlier T&D/Fox Theatre down the street, before it became the United Artists, and its neighboring theatre, called the Studio during the war but later renamed the Crest (I can’t find the Studio/Crest listed at Cinema Treasures.) There are also a couple of close views of the State Theatre.
This ca.1943 photo by Dorothea Lange depicts the State Theatre. The picture is one of a large number of photos taken in Richmond by Lange during WWII, afew of which depict the city’s theatres.
During WWII, photographer Dorothea Lange took numerous photographs of Richmond, most of them related to the Kaiser shipyards and their workers, but including quite a few that depicted scenes on McDonald Avenue. Today they are available in digital form as part of the Lange collection displayed online here by the Online Archives of California.
A very few of the photos depict the street’s theatres, including this one, showing the U.A. in 1942, when it was still the Fox, and also showing its next door neighbor, the Studio Theatre. Some time later the Studio was renamed the Crest, and its sign is visible just past the U.A. in the second of the two photos to which Lost Memory linked in the comment just above this one. I don’t think the Studio/Crest is listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
From the UCLA collection of L.A. Times and Daily News photos, here’s the Globe with the name “Newsreel” on its marquee. The occasion was an April, 1948 demonstration by Costa Rican emigres against their government at home. Down the block, the future Newsreel
Theatre (and former and future Tower Theatre) can be seen with the name “Music Hall” on its vertical sign.
That magazine is spreading some old misinformation about the Metropolitan Water District and William Mulholland again. The office building attached to the Million Dollar was called the Edison Building. Southern California Edison Company had its offices there. Mulholland was with the L.A. Department of Water and Power, not the MWD. LADWP’s offices were a block up Broadway near 2nd St. The MWD was not even in existence when the Million Dollar was built. MWD was incorporated in 1928 and later took over Edison’s old offices some time after SCE relocated to the new (the 3rd in L.A. of the name) Edison Building at 5th and Grand about 1931.
And to think that somebody got paid to write that article.
Here’s a photo of the Northpoint early in its history, from the Pacific Bus Museum website (naturally there’s a bus in the foreground.) The movie featured on the theatre’s marquee, “Up the Junction”, was a British film released in the U.S. on March 13, 1968.
“A multi-use conversion of an unoccupied, 1920s town-center cinema to include a new 3-screen cinema addition, retail, restaurant and office space.”
So this does confirm that the three current auditoriums are in an entirely new wing of the building, while the old theatre has been converted to other uses.
Crown Theatres has popped its last kernel of corn. As of October 1, 2007, its last remaining seats were transfered to Kerasotes Theatres. Most of its east coast operations had already been sold to Bow Tie Cinemas. RIP, Crown Theatres.
According to an article in the Bakersfield Californian of December 13, 2007, Pacific Theatres is going to sell this multiplex and a number of others that are outside the greater Los Angeles area (a total of 15 of its 29 locations) to Reading International, a theatre and real estate company which is based in Commerce, California. Reading operates cinemas in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, as well as several live performance venues in the U.S., mainly in New York.
Reading’s best known cinemas in the United States are probably the Angelika Film Centers in New York and Texas.
I think that this multiplex may have replaced an early 1960s theatre called the Valley Plaza, which was originally built by Statewide Theatres and then operated by Loew’s Theatres beginning in 1967, but I can’t find any confirmation that this shopping center was that theatre’s actual location. Does anyone familiar with Bakersfield in the 1960s know anything about it? The building would have been a near-twin to Statewide’s Inland Theatre in San Bernardino.
The Orange Cinedome was another of the many Syufy theatres designed by the San Francisco architect Vincent G. Raney.
I notice that the link in the introductory section of this page no longer works, nor does the link added by papibear in his comment of October 13, 2003. Here’s a link to the “From Script to DVD” website page about the Cinedome, where a few photos are displayed.
The Cinema 21 and the three nearly identical theatres built by Statewide around that time were all designed by the San Diego firm of Tucker, Sadler & Bennett. The Anaheim theatre is listed at Cinema Treasures as the Century 21, but I can’t currently find a CT listing for the Inland Theatre in San Bernardino or for the theatre in Bakersfield.
The architectural firm still exists as Tucker Sadler Architects, and Harold G. Sadler is apparently still active in it. It would be interesting if he turned up at Cinema Treasures and told us something about these theatres.
Although this theatre bore the name Century 21, it was not a Syufy house and was not designed by Syufy’s architect of that era, Vincent G. Raney. Raney’s Century 21, 22, etc. designs for the Syufy/Century chain were domed. Statewide’s Anaheim Century 21 was not domed. The Century 21 Theater in Anaheim was designed by the San Diego firm of Tucker, Sadler & Bennett. It was one of four similar houses designed by that firm for Statewide Theatres. One of them, Cinema 21 in San Diego, has only recently been listed on Cinema Treasures. The other two (the Inland Theatre in San Bernardino and a theatre in Bakersfield) are apparently not yet listed here.
There was a Raney-designed Syufy domed theatre in Orange County, the Orange Cinedome, opened in 1969 as a twin screen (each in its own dome) house called the Cinedome 20 & 21. I guess they used that name because they found their “Century 21” name had already been taken locally by Statewide’s earlier theatre.
Though the domed theatre in the Cine Arts complex superficially resembles the earlier Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, they are very different structurally, and they were not designed by the same architect. Pacific’s Cinerama Dome was designed by Welton Beckett & Associates and was intended to be the prototype for a chain of concrete, geodesic dome theatres in which to show Cinerama movies. The building proved more costly to erect that was expected, and the demand for Cinerama movies proved less than the company had hoped, and thus the Hollywood dome remains the sole example of its kind.
The CineArts dome, on the other hand, was one of several non-geodesic domed theatres designed for Syufy’s Century Theatres by San Francisco architect Vincent G. Raney. Through the 1960s the Syufy brothers erected domed theatres in many western cities, and at least as far east as Utah, where their seventh Century 21 dome was opened in 1967. From the description of South Salt Lake’s Century 21 on this page, it was typical of Century’s Raney-designed domed theatres. Click on the “Photos” link in the left panel of that page to see how Raney’s domes were put together.
There’s a bit about the early history of the Criterion on this page, which is devoted mostly to the Rodgers Theatre and its builder, I.W. Rodgers.
The Criterion was built in 1911, by William N. Barron. After it was damaged by a fire in 1914, Barron leased the theatre to Rodgers, who repaired it and later bought it from him. Rodgers closed the Criterion when he opened the nearby Rodgers Theatre in 1949, according to this website, but another Poplar Bluff history website has a photo which leads me to suspect that the Criterion might have been open into the early 1950s.
This page features a couple of nocturnal color photos of Poplar Bluff ca.1954 (click them to embiggen). The second one shows the Rodgers Theatre at 4th (now Broadway) and Pine, but the first picture shows Main Street, and it includes a bright but blurry set of lights in the distance which look to me very much like the marquee and vertical sign of a theatre, and it looks to me as though the vertical says “Criterion”. The caption of the photo doesn’t mention the theatre, though, so maybe I’m imagining I see it.
Also, there’s a black and white aerial photo from 1949 sharing the page with the two night photos which shows the geographic relationship between the Criterion, facing the town’s Courthouse square in the foreground, and the Rodgers one block farther down and across Pine Street, to the right.
A recent photo of the Grand Theatre. And there’s a brief announcement near the top of this web page that says that the Grand will be reopening soon and will feature “supper, film and performance”. No date is mentioned.
The details on the outside of the Golden Gate look more Renaissance-Baroque than anything else to me. The interior is similar to the original interior of Lansburgh’s Hillstreet Theatre in Los Angeles, which had an predominantly Gothic style in both its auditorium and other areas, until it got a remodel in the late 1940s.
But Lansburgh did put these Gothic elements into a highly classicized framework, which made the auditoriums look almost like Renaissance designs with Gothic detailing. The Golden Gate’s auditorium seems to me to have a strong Venetian Gothic influence, though, while the Hillstreet has overall more eccentric features that are hard to pin down as any particular sort of Gothic. I think Albert may have been on the pipe when he designed the Hillstreet.
It’s often difficult to classify movie theatres according to standard styles as they are usually defined by architecture critics, because so many palace architects mixed together various elements of various styles from different periods or different cultures, and sometimes added novel and unprecedented stylistic flourishes of their own invention. Plus it’s not uncommon for the interior style of a theatre and the exterior style of its building to differ, even when they were designed by the same architect.
Because of their eclecticism, and their frequently fantastical stylistic elements, I don’t think we’ll ever get a truly precise nomenclature for describing movie theatre architecture. Way too many theatres were sui generis.
This theatre was opened by Joseph Corwin, founder of the Metropolitan Theatres circuit. Metropolitan’s page says that Joseph Corwin opened the Broadway, his first theatre in Los Angeles, in 1923. Thus it was always operated by Metropolitan, and was never Tally’s New Broadway.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only “New Broadway” theatre that ever existed on Broadway was Tally’s New Broadway Theatre at Broadway near 6th, which is the one listed at Cinema Treasures as the Garnett Theatre. That the Garnett was called Tally’s New Broadway is undeniable from the photographic evidence.
We haven’t pinned down the opening year for the Garnett/Tally’s New Broadway yet. From this photograph at the USC Archives we can see that the theatre pre-dated the Story Building on the SE corner of 6th and Broadway, on which construction began in 1908.
This theatre definitely predates the oldest surviving theatre on Broadway, the Cameo, which opened in 1910 as Clune’s Broadway. As far as Tally’s being the first movie theatre built on Broadway, it’s quite possible, though it’s also possible that a storefront nickelodeon or two opened earlier.
The large version of the ca.1909 photo of the theatre linked by kenmc on Oct. 6 2006 has moved. It’s here now. Noting the decoration along the top of the structure, it appears that Tally’s and Silverwood’s shared the same building. Silverwood’s at first occupied only a corner spot, and eventually expanded to occupy the entire building (ca.1913). By the 1920s they were in the multi-story building which remains on that site today.
From the Oakland Library, via the Online Archive of California, here is College Avenue in 1930, the Uptown Theatre in the distance (photo is highly zoom-able, so you can get a decent, though oblique, look at the front.)
The assessor’s information for this address is reported as part of a bundle, with the addresses 1232, 1234, 1236 and 1238 W. 7th. Street included. On a parcel of 11,717 sq. ft., there are said to be four buildings, but information for only one building is included on the assessor’s report, and that one is a structure of 8697 sq. ft., built in 1913.
The Playhouse is among the movie theatres listed in a 1914 ad reproduced on this L.A. Times blog page. A TerraServer satellite view of the location shows a building that looks as though it might have been a theatre. If somebody could check this one out, I think they might find that the Playhouse hasn’t been demolished after all.
Here is a 1959 photo of MacDonald Avenue at night, with the Fox Theatre (formerly the Costa) on the left. The U.A.’s marquee would have been in the foreground on the right, but this picture was apparently taken when the theatre was being remodeled into a Woolworth store. The building is covered in scaffolding, the vertical sign is gone, and the marquee looks to have been rounded off for Woolworth’s use.
During WWII, when Richmond’s population boomed due to the development of the Kaiser shipyards, photographer Dorothea Lange took hundreds of photos of the city. A large selection of these pictures are now available in digital form from the Online Archive of California. While most of the photos were related to the shipyards and their workers, a number depicted McDonald Avenue and, among those, a few of the street’s movie houses appeared.
So far I haven’t seen any photos of the Costa/Fox in the collection, but there are few pictures of the earlier T&D/Fox Theatre down the street, before it became the United Artists, and its neighboring theatre, called the Studio during the war but later renamed the Crest (I can’t find the Studio/Crest listed at Cinema Treasures.) There are also a couple of close views of the State Theatre.
This ca.1943 photo by Dorothea Lange depicts the State Theatre. The picture is one of a large number of photos taken in Richmond by Lange during WWII, afew of which depict the city’s theatres.
During WWII, photographer Dorothea Lange took numerous photographs of Richmond, most of them related to the Kaiser shipyards and their workers, but including quite a few that depicted scenes on McDonald Avenue. Today they are available in digital form as part of the Lange collection displayed online here by the Online Archives of California.
A very few of the photos depict the street’s theatres, including this one, showing the U.A. in 1942, when it was still the Fox, and also showing its next door neighbor, the Studio Theatre. Some time later the Studio was renamed the Crest, and its sign is visible just past the U.A. in the second of the two photos to which Lost Memory linked in the comment just above this one. I don’t think the Studio/Crest is listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
From the UCLA collection of L.A. Times and Daily News photos, here’s the Globe with the name “Newsreel” on its marquee. The occasion was an April, 1948 demonstration by Costa Rican emigres against their government at home. Down the block, the future Newsreel
Theatre (and former and future Tower Theatre) can be seen with the name “Music Hall” on its vertical sign.
Assessor information indicates that the building at 1122 W. 24th St. was erected in 1921.
That magazine is spreading some old misinformation about the Metropolitan Water District and William Mulholland again. The office building attached to the Million Dollar was called the Edison Building. Southern California Edison Company had its offices there. Mulholland was with the L.A. Department of Water and Power, not the MWD. LADWP’s offices were a block up Broadway near 2nd St. The MWD was not even in existence when the Million Dollar was built. MWD was incorporated in 1928 and later took over Edison’s old offices some time after SCE relocated to the new (the 3rd in L.A. of the name) Edison Building at 5th and Grand about 1931.
And to think that somebody got paid to write that article.
Here’s a photo of the Northpoint early in its history, from the Pacific Bus Museum website (naturally there’s a bus in the foreground.) The movie featured on the theatre’s marquee, “Up the Junction”, was a British film released in the U.S. on March 13, 1968.
The architects for the renovation, Khun-Riddle Architects, describe the project thusly:
So this does confirm that the three current auditoriums are in an entirely new wing of the building, while the old theatre has been converted to other uses.Crown Theatres has popped its last kernel of corn. As of October 1, 2007, its last remaining seats were transfered to Kerasotes Theatres. Most of its east coast operations had already been sold to Bow Tie Cinemas. RIP, Crown Theatres.
According to an article in the Bakersfield Californian of December 13, 2007, Pacific Theatres is going to sell this multiplex and a number of others that are outside the greater Los Angeles area (a total of 15 of its 29 locations) to Reading International, a theatre and real estate company which is based in Commerce, California. Reading operates cinemas in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, as well as several live performance venues in the U.S., mainly in New York.
Reading’s best known cinemas in the United States are probably the Angelika Film Centers in New York and Texas.
I think that this multiplex may have replaced an early 1960s theatre called the Valley Plaza, which was originally built by Statewide Theatres and then operated by Loew’s Theatres beginning in 1967, but I can’t find any confirmation that this shopping center was that theatre’s actual location. Does anyone familiar with Bakersfield in the 1960s know anything about it? The building would have been a near-twin to Statewide’s Inland Theatre in San Bernardino.
The Orange Cinedome was another of the many Syufy theatres designed by the San Francisco architect Vincent G. Raney.
I notice that the link in the introductory section of this page no longer works, nor does the link added by papibear in his comment of October 13, 2003. Here’s a link to the “From Script to DVD” website page about the Cinedome, where a few photos are displayed.
According to a 1974 newspaper ad now displayed on this page at the “From Script to DVD” website, the Cinema 21 was located at 810 N. Euclid Avenue.
The Cinema 21 and the three nearly identical theatres built by Statewide around that time were all designed by the San Diego firm of Tucker, Sadler & Bennett. The Anaheim theatre is listed at Cinema Treasures as the Century 21, but I can’t currently find a CT listing for the Inland Theatre in San Bernardino or for the theatre in Bakersfield.
The architectural firm still exists as Tucker Sadler Architects, and Harold G. Sadler is apparently still active in it. It would be interesting if he turned up at Cinema Treasures and told us something about these theatres.
Although this theatre bore the name Century 21, it was not a Syufy house and was not designed by Syufy’s architect of that era, Vincent G. Raney. Raney’s Century 21, 22, etc. designs for the Syufy/Century chain were domed. Statewide’s Anaheim Century 21 was not domed. The Century 21 Theater in Anaheim was designed by the San Diego firm of Tucker, Sadler & Bennett. It was one of four similar houses designed by that firm for Statewide Theatres. One of them, Cinema 21 in San Diego, has only recently been listed on Cinema Treasures. The other two (the Inland Theatre in San Bernardino and a theatre in Bakersfield) are apparently not yet listed here.
There was a Raney-designed Syufy domed theatre in Orange County, the Orange Cinedome, opened in 1969 as a twin screen (each in its own dome) house called the Cinedome 20 & 21. I guess they used that name because they found their “Century 21” name had already been taken locally by Statewide’s earlier theatre.
Though the domed theatre in the Cine Arts complex superficially resembles the earlier Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, they are very different structurally, and they were not designed by the same architect. Pacific’s Cinerama Dome was designed by Welton Beckett & Associates and was intended to be the prototype for a chain of concrete, geodesic dome theatres in which to show Cinerama movies. The building proved more costly to erect that was expected, and the demand for Cinerama movies proved less than the company had hoped, and thus the Hollywood dome remains the sole example of its kind.
The CineArts dome, on the other hand, was one of several non-geodesic domed theatres designed for Syufy’s Century Theatres by San Francisco architect Vincent G. Raney. Through the 1960s the Syufy brothers erected domed theatres in many western cities, and at least as far east as Utah, where their seventh Century 21 dome was opened in 1967. From the description of South Salt Lake’s Century 21 on this page, it was typical of Century’s Raney-designed domed theatres. Click on the “Photos” link in the left panel of that page to see how Raney’s domes were put together.
There’s a bit about the early history of the Criterion on this page, which is devoted mostly to the Rodgers Theatre and its builder, I.W. Rodgers.
The Criterion was built in 1911, by William N. Barron. After it was damaged by a fire in 1914, Barron leased the theatre to Rodgers, who repaired it and later bought it from him. Rodgers closed the Criterion when he opened the nearby Rodgers Theatre in 1949, according to this website, but another Poplar Bluff history website has a photo which leads me to suspect that the Criterion might have been open into the early 1950s.
This page features a couple of nocturnal color photos of Poplar Bluff ca.1954 (click them to embiggen). The second one shows the Rodgers Theatre at 4th (now Broadway) and Pine, but the first picture shows Main Street, and it includes a bright but blurry set of lights in the distance which look to me very much like the marquee and vertical sign of a theatre, and it looks to me as though the vertical says “Criterion”. The caption of the photo doesn’t mention the theatre, though, so maybe I’m imagining I see it.
Also, there’s a black and white aerial photo from 1949 sharing the page with the two night photos which shows the geographic relationship between the Criterion, facing the town’s Courthouse square in the foreground, and the Rodgers one block farther down and across Pine Street, to the right.
A recent photo of the Grand Theatre. And there’s a brief announcement near the top of this web page that says that the Grand will be reopening soon and will feature “supper, film and performance”. No date is mentioned.
Like most of the Cinemark Megaplexes of its era, the Cinemark at Seven Bridges was designed by the Kansas City firm, TK Architects.
The former MegaStar 16 in Edina was designed by the Kansas City firm TK Architects.