Copy of an e-mail I sent to Julie Moran Alterio, author of the Journal News article:
[quote]Dear Ms. Alterio,
This is in regard to your Journal News article of July 23, 2006 headlined “AMC expands market for independent films.” The second paragraph contains the statement “…AMC Theatres, the company that invented the two-screen multiplex in 1963….” If AMC is making that claim, they are spreading misinformation. AMC might have opened the first purpose-built twin theatre, but by 1963 at least two theatres had long since received second screens and operated as twin cinemas.
The invention of the multiplex is most commonly mis-attributed to Nat Taylor, a Canadian who added a second auditorium to the Elgin Theatre in Ottawa as early as 1947. Taylor was later associated with the Cineplex corporation. However, there was at least one two-screen theatre that was in operation even earlier than the Elgin.
In 1941, James Edwards (founder of the Edwards Theatre Circuit, later Edwards Cinemas and now part of the Regal Entertainment Group) added a second auditorium to his 1920’s-vintage Alhambra Theatre in Alhambra, California. From 1941 until the 1950’s, the theatre operated as the Alhambra & Annex, which is how I remember it being advertised in the local newspaper, Copley Press’s Alhambra Post-Advocate. After a renovation, the second auditorium was given the name Gold Cinema, but it continued to share box office, lobby and other facilities with the Alhambra. In its final years, the complex was operated under the name Alhambra Twin Cinemas. It was demolished after being severely damaged by an earthquake in 1987, and replaced by a 10-screen Edwards cinema called the Atlantic Palace. Though the building is gone, the history of its operation as a twin theatre is documented in old newspaper articles and advertisements.
I know this is a very minor concern, but I like to correct this bit of misinformation whenever I come across it. There may have been twin cinemas even earlier than the Alhambra & Annex, but until one is discovered to have existed, credit for inventing the twin-screen multiplex should go to James Edwards, not to Nat Taylor, Cineplex, or AMC.
Joe Vogel[/quote]
Yeah, I know, I’m a bit nutty on the subject, but having grown up as a patron of the Alhambra (and being the guy who added the Alhambra Twin Cinemas to the Cinema Treasures database), I figure I’m entitled.
And by the way (speaking of obsessions): The Alhambra Twin’s successor theatre still needs its CT page updated to show the correct number of screens (10, not 14) and its correct name: Edwards Atlantic Palace 10. It’s been listed under the wrong name for more than three years now.
Ah, so the Florence district Kinema IS listed here. I checked the 2004 Urban Areas map for the theatre’s address at Microsoft’s Terraserver, and though the site is being fussy tonight and won’t give me a full image, it’s clear from what displays that the theatre building must be gone. It would have been on the west side of Compton just south of Firestone. The old buildings on that corner appear to have been demolished at some time in order to straighten out a jog in Compton as it crosses Firestone.
Tom: Apparently, the name Florence-Graham does refer to the district of Florence southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. I just came across this PDF file in the California Index, and though it says nothing about the theatres there, it does contain a paragraph confirming the early use of the hyphenated name for the area. That’s where you should expect to find your Kinema Theatre, if its building still exists.
Tom: I’m wondering about the name Florence-Graham, CA. The only Florence I know of in the state is the old unincorporated area sandwiched between south central L.A. and the cities of Huntington Park and South Gate. I’ve never seen the hyphenated name Florence-Graham before.
There were once theatres called the Kinema in downtown Los Angeles (later the Fox Criterion), Fresno and Long Beach. I’ve checked the L.A. library’s California Index and can’t find any other theatres with that name (the index is far from exhaustive, though.) The only theatre I know of in the Florence area was the Fox Florence Theatre, but the area developed early and certainly must have had other theatres.
The Architect is named at top as “Richard D. Bates”, but his middle initial should be “M” for Mortimer. He was Richard Mortimer Bates Jr., (1887-1948), an Alabama native who had worked in New York City and who arrived in Los Angeles only a short while before designing the Westlake. He designed mostly schools and banks, and this was probably the only theatre he designed.
vokoban: The information about the 1909 real estate deal is especially interesting. $225,000 for a 61' Main Street lot with a mere $46,000 building on it! In those days, that would have bought about 50 nice suburban houses on lots of the same size in places like Glendale or Alhambra. I really like that the buyer’s name was “Mordough” though.
I guess we can assume 1905 or early 1906 as the opening date of the People’s Theatre. I wonder when Charles Alphin took over and renamed it the Olympic? The Internet Broadway Database credits only this one production to Alphin. My guess would be that he came to Los Angeles sometime after that production closed in mid-1908.
Jeff: Culver City, California was a real estate development planned in 1913, opened in 1914, and named for the developer, Harry Culver, a native of Nebraska who arrived in California in 1910, so there’s no connection with the Culver section of Brooklyn, which undoubtedly used the name first.
Here is a picture of Main Street north from the Pacific Electric Building at 6th street, taken about January 1st, 1907. I would imagine the date to be accurate, as it depicts one of the rare winters when snow fell in downtown Los Angeles. At the lower left, the building which housed the Gaiety Theatre is clearly visible.
A second picture taken at the same time from another angle shows the facade more clearly. Using the zoom and scroll features of the USC Archive site, I found it possible to get a decent view of the sign in front of the entrance. It reads “People’s Theatre”, so we have yet one more name to add to the theatre’s history, and an opening date of no later than 1906.
So far, the only picture linked from this page which shows the Pan-Pacific Theatre is this one posted a few days ago by ken mc. All the other pictures depict the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, an adjacent but separate, earlier building which was designed by different architects and which never housed a movie theatre.
The streamline moderne Pan-Pacific Auditorium opened in 1935. It was designed by William Wurdeman and Welton Becket. It long served as L.A.’s most popular venue for events such as home shows, car shows, livestock exhibitions, and ice shows, gradually declining as more modern and larger venues opened in other parts of the city beginning in the 1960’s. It closed after the construction of the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown in 1972.
I’ve been unable to find an opening date for the adjacent Pan-Pacific Theatre, but it was probably built within five years of the opening of the auditorium. It was designed by architect William Pereira. The theatre remained in operation for more than a decade after the auditorium closed. The announcement of the closing of the theatre appeared in The Los Angeles Times of September 23, 1984.
Both Becket and Pereira went on to establish firms which would leave a lasting mark on Los Angeles. Becket was responsible for such landmarks as Bullock’s Pasadena, the Prudential Building on Wilshire Boulevard, and the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Pereira’s local landmarks included CBS Television City (in collaboration with his then business partner Charles Luckman), the original 1960’s era buildings of the Los Angeles County Art Museum at Hancock Park, and the master plan for the University of California Irvine campus. Eventually, Pereira and Becket collaborated on the design of the spider-legged “Theme Building” at Los Angeles International Airport, but in the era when the Pan-Pacific Auditorium and the Pan_Pacific Theatre were built, the two architects were not collaborators, and the two distinct buildings housing auditorium and theatre were designed independently.
The Julius Shulman photo found by ken mc reveals that, whatever the style of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium (I always thought it closer to streamline moderne than art deco), the Pan-Pacific Theatre was not art deco at all, but plain modern, maybe with some proto-googie touches (all those angular elements.) I’d guess that the Shulman photo dates from sometime around 1940. This entry needs a whole new introductory paragraph.
Ken: You’ve found the smoking gun! The Gaiety was definitely the Olympic/Alphin/Omar/Moon Theatre! That’s the same building that housed the Omar in the c1917 photo I linked to above. The rear of that parked car that shows on the left side of your picture looks like a very late 1930’s or early 1940’s model, so that’s the earliest this picture could have been taken. The Watts-bound streetcar bears the logo of the Pacific Electric Railroad, so it would be no later than the early 1950’s when both P.E. and L.A.Railway service was taken over by Metropolitan Transit Lines.
The fall of shadows indicates some time around mid-afternoon,probably near the summer solstice. Quite a few pedestrians coupled with little traffic suggests Sunday, and also gives a strong suggestion that this picture might have been taken during the war years when gasoline was being rationed. It’s too bad more of the marquee isn’t visible, showing the names of the movies, since they can give an earliest possible year for a theatre photo.
Ken: The Hollywood branch of Barker Bros. furniture store may have been an original tenant of the El Capitan building. Barker Bros. was L.A.’s major furniture emporium, founded about 1880 and closed in 1992. Their huge main store on 7th Street downtown was built in the 1920’s, but the company was always one of the city’s most progressive and may have planted a branch in Hollywood in that same period. I know that by the 1940’s, they had branches in many suburban shopping districts considerably less affluent than Hollywood.
It opened as a playhouse with the name El Capitan, was later renamed the Paramount, and then the original name was restored by the Disney Company with their 1990’s renovation.
Ken: It was the other El Capitan, the one on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard, which was the venue for Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. At that time, the Hollywood Boulevard El Capitan was called the Paramount and was exclusively a movie house.
Ken: The first of those three photos certainly dates from the period just after the old State Normal School was demolished and just before the library was built. Fifth Street has not yet been connected between Grand and Flower. It looks as though it was under construction at the time the picture was taken. You can see that the hillside that later became the location of the big concrete wall has been partly graded.
Temple Baptist Church still owned the building at the time the second photo was taken, so they must have approved of the big Alka-Seltzer sign on the roof. It was the Philharmonic that was the tenant in the building.
Though it doesn’t look like it today, when Pershing Square was rebuilt following the construction of the underground garage the landscaping was quite pleasant. The large grassy section in the center featuring two fountains was off limits to the public, but the perimeter of the park featured both an inner and an outer walkway. The outer walkway was lined with planters whose walls were of a good height for sitting, and the inner walkway was lined with benches overlooking the central lawn, some of the bearing the quaint sign “Reserved for Ladies”. The place was busy all the time and, though many of the park’s regular denizens were of sorts thought by suburbanites to be unsavory, I was there many times and never felt in the least bit threatened by any of them (though I did frequently get panhandled and asked if I’d found Jesus yet.)
The planting was mostly tropical, with palms, banana trees and ferns, and the whole perimeter was quite lush and well shaded. This tropical landscape was lost to a bland renovation in the mid-1960s which was instigated by the administration of Mayor Sam Yorty, a resident of the San Fernando Valley who disliked the liveliness of downtown and did his best to destroy as many of its amenities as possible.
The Times Theatre was located in the auditorium of the Friday Morning Club, a womens' organization. The auditorium opened on Monday, May 5th, 1924, and was for several years a popular venue for plays, lectures and musical performances. It was used for club functions as well.
I’ve been unable to find during which years the Times Theatre operated, but it had long been closed by 1977, the year in which the building was sold by the Friday Morning Club to Milt Larsen and was converted into the not-for-profit Variety Arts Center, dedicated to preserving historic forms of live entertainment such as Vaudeville.
The five story Italian Renaissance style building was designed by the Los Angeles architectural firm of Allison & Allison. In addition to the large auditorium, it contains a smaller theatre (apparently never used as a movie house) and various meeting and club rooms. The building was declared a city monument in 1978, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
In 2004, the building was purchased by the Anshutz Entertainment Group, the company which is building the massive L.A. Live entertainment complex a few blocks farther south on Figueroa Street. For now, the theatre remains dark while the company studies options for reuse of the venue.
Ken: I found that they’ve given the Winter-Hunt site a new URL, but it’s to no avail. The text pages display, but clicking on the thumbnail photos still brings up nothing but the same thumbnails on individual pages.
Here is a photo of Amarillo’s Esquire Theatre, from the Amarillo Public Library web site. There is information about the theatre on that page, too, but some of it it doesn’t match the information on this CT page. The address is given as 1808 South Washington, and the seating capacity is listed as 763. The date of the grand opening is given as October 24, 1947.
Also, it’s always a good idea when using BBS code to hit the “Preview” button first instead of the “Submit” button, and then test the link before submitting the post, to make sure it’s been set up right and that it actually works! I didn’t do that just now, and ended up using the wrong URL for my link! Here’s the right link to the CNET forum page: BBS Code.
This is not a duplicate listing. Jackson and Sutter Creek are two different cities. Whether or not the Jackson Ratto was later renamed the Jackson Theatre has not yet been established. A Jackson Theatre did exist in Jackson, but it is not listed at Cinema Treasures, and I haven’t found an address for it.
There were also Ratto Theatres in Ione and Plymouth and, from 1912 to 1919, the original Sutter Creek Ratto Theatre was located in a building (still extant) across the street from the theatre’s present location, so there were a total of five known Ratto Theatre locations altogether.
I’ve never met any of the Rattos, so I don’t know exactly how their name is pronounced. In Italy, it was probably pronounced more like “Rah-toh” and with the “R” trilled, but in California it might very well have ended up being pronounced Rat-oh.
The Rattos were among a large number of Italian families that were part of the cosmopolitan wave of immigrants settling in the Sierra foothills in the years after 1849. Amador County in particular attracted many Italian immigrants, and at one time Italians were the largest single group in the area. They remain numerous today.
Ken: I didn’t think anyone would ever unearth a picture of the Times Theatre,a nd that it was gone forever. But then, I didn’t know that the Times Theatre was actually located in the Friday Morning Club building, and thus was one and the same with the Variety Arts Center. Apparently neither did William when he posted this theatre, or he wouldn’t have listed it as being “closed, demolished”. The listing definitely needs an update. Thanks for digging up this happy news.
I’d say that the Times/Variety Arts has a bright future, being located in the new entertainment district that appears to be forming along south Figueroa Street. Now that we know it is the building of the Friday Morning Club, it seems likely that we could even find the name of the architect in the California Index at the L.A. Library web site.
Copy of an e-mail I sent to Julie Moran Alterio, author of the Journal News article:
[quote]Dear Ms. Alterio,
This is in regard to your Journal News article of July 23, 2006 headlined “AMC expands market for independent films.” The second paragraph contains the statement “…AMC Theatres, the company that invented the two-screen multiplex in 1963….” If AMC is making that claim, they are spreading misinformation. AMC might have opened the first purpose-built twin theatre, but by 1963 at least two theatres had long since received second screens and operated as twin cinemas.
The invention of the multiplex is most commonly mis-attributed to Nat Taylor, a Canadian who added a second auditorium to the Elgin Theatre in Ottawa as early as 1947. Taylor was later associated with the Cineplex corporation. However, there was at least one two-screen theatre that was in operation even earlier than the Elgin.
In 1941, James Edwards (founder of the Edwards Theatre Circuit, later Edwards Cinemas and now part of the Regal Entertainment Group) added a second auditorium to his 1920’s-vintage Alhambra Theatre in Alhambra, California. From 1941 until the 1950’s, the theatre operated as the Alhambra & Annex, which is how I remember it being advertised in the local newspaper, Copley Press’s Alhambra Post-Advocate. After a renovation, the second auditorium was given the name Gold Cinema, but it continued to share box office, lobby and other facilities with the Alhambra. In its final years, the complex was operated under the name Alhambra Twin Cinemas. It was demolished after being severely damaged by an earthquake in 1987, and replaced by a 10-screen Edwards cinema called the Atlantic Palace. Though the building is gone, the history of its operation as a twin theatre is documented in old newspaper articles and advertisements.
I know this is a very minor concern, but I like to correct this bit of misinformation whenever I come across it. There may have been twin cinemas even earlier than the Alhambra & Annex, but until one is discovered to have existed, credit for inventing the twin-screen multiplex should go to James Edwards, not to Nat Taylor, Cineplex, or AMC.
Joe Vogel[/quote]
Yeah, I know, I’m a bit nutty on the subject, but having grown up as a patron of the Alhambra (and being the guy who added the Alhambra Twin Cinemas to the Cinema Treasures database), I figure I’m entitled.
And by the way (speaking of obsessions): The Alhambra Twin’s successor theatre still needs its CT page updated to show the correct number of screens (10, not 14) and its correct name: Edwards Atlantic Palace 10. It’s been listed under the wrong name for more than three years now.
Ah, so the Florence district Kinema IS listed here. I checked the 2004 Urban Areas map for the theatre’s address at Microsoft’s Terraserver, and though the site is being fussy tonight and won’t give me a full image, it’s clear from what displays that the theatre building must be gone. It would have been on the west side of Compton just south of Firestone. The old buildings on that corner appear to have been demolished at some time in order to straighten out a jog in Compton as it crosses Firestone.
Tom: Apparently, the name Florence-Graham does refer to the district of Florence southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. I just came across this PDF file in the California Index, and though it says nothing about the theatres there, it does contain a paragraph confirming the early use of the hyphenated name for the area. That’s where you should expect to find your Kinema Theatre, if its building still exists.
Tom: I’m wondering about the name Florence-Graham, CA. The only Florence I know of in the state is the old unincorporated area sandwiched between south central L.A. and the cities of Huntington Park and South Gate. I’ve never seen the hyphenated name Florence-Graham before.
There were once theatres called the Kinema in downtown Los Angeles (later the Fox Criterion), Fresno and Long Beach. I’ve checked the L.A. library’s California Index and can’t find any other theatres with that name (the index is far from exhaustive, though.) The only theatre I know of in the Florence area was the Fox Florence Theatre, but the area developed early and certainly must have had other theatres.
I’m sure it’s the same building. The known address matches up with each name, and the available photographs match as well.
I doubt it will get the record for most names though. In L.A., that would probably go to the Mozart Theater.
The Architect is named at top as “Richard D. Bates”, but his middle initial should be “M” for Mortimer. He was Richard Mortimer Bates Jr., (1887-1948), an Alabama native who had worked in New York City and who arrived in Los Angeles only a short while before designing the Westlake. He designed mostly schools and banks, and this was probably the only theatre he designed.
vokoban: The information about the 1909 real estate deal is especially interesting. $225,000 for a 61' Main Street lot with a mere $46,000 building on it! In those days, that would have bought about 50 nice suburban houses on lots of the same size in places like Glendale or Alhambra. I really like that the buyer’s name was “Mordough” though.
I guess we can assume 1905 or early 1906 as the opening date of the People’s Theatre. I wonder when Charles Alphin took over and renamed it the Olympic? The Internet Broadway Database credits only this one production to Alphin. My guess would be that he came to Los Angeles sometime after that production closed in mid-1908.
Jeff: Culver City, California was a real estate development planned in 1913, opened in 1914, and named for the developer, Harry Culver, a native of Nebraska who arrived in California in 1910, so there’s no connection with the Culver section of Brooklyn, which undoubtedly used the name first.
Further information for an update:
Here is a picture of Main Street north from the Pacific Electric Building at 6th street, taken about January 1st, 1907. I would imagine the date to be accurate, as it depicts one of the rare winters when snow fell in downtown Los Angeles. At the lower left, the building which housed the Gaiety Theatre is clearly visible.
A second picture taken at the same time from another angle shows the facade more clearly. Using the zoom and scroll features of the USC Archive site, I found it possible to get a decent view of the sign in front of the entrance. It reads “People’s Theatre”, so we have yet one more name to add to the theatre’s history, and an opening date of no later than 1906.
Auditorium vs. Theatre
So far, the only picture linked from this page which shows the Pan-Pacific Theatre is this one posted a few days ago by ken mc. All the other pictures depict the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, an adjacent but separate, earlier building which was designed by different architects and which never housed a movie theatre.
The streamline moderne Pan-Pacific Auditorium opened in 1935. It was designed by William Wurdeman and Welton Becket. It long served as L.A.’s most popular venue for events such as home shows, car shows, livestock exhibitions, and ice shows, gradually declining as more modern and larger venues opened in other parts of the city beginning in the 1960’s. It closed after the construction of the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown in 1972.
I’ve been unable to find an opening date for the adjacent Pan-Pacific Theatre, but it was probably built within five years of the opening of the auditorium. It was designed by architect William Pereira. The theatre remained in operation for more than a decade after the auditorium closed. The announcement of the closing of the theatre appeared in The Los Angeles Times of September 23, 1984.
Both Becket and Pereira went on to establish firms which would leave a lasting mark on Los Angeles. Becket was responsible for such landmarks as Bullock’s Pasadena, the Prudential Building on Wilshire Boulevard, and the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Pereira’s local landmarks included CBS Television City (in collaboration with his then business partner Charles Luckman), the original 1960’s era buildings of the Los Angeles County Art Museum at Hancock Park, and the master plan for the University of California Irvine campus. Eventually, Pereira and Becket collaborated on the design of the spider-legged “Theme Building” at Los Angeles International Airport, but in the era when the Pan-Pacific Auditorium and the Pan_Pacific Theatre were built, the two architects were not collaborators, and the two distinct buildings housing auditorium and theatre were designed independently.
For update:
Correct address: 523 S. Main Street.
Opened as a vaudeville house called the Olympic Theatre, probably before 1910. Operated by Charles Alphin, then by R.F. Woodley.
Returned to control of Charles Alphin and renamed the Alphin Theatre in 1914.
Renamed the Omar Theatre by 1917. For a while had a blade sign reading “Burlesque”. Leased to Gore Brothers in 1922.
Renamed the Moon Theatre by 1923. Advertised at that time as showing movies made by Paramount.
Renamed the Gaiety by the early 1940’s.
That’s all we’ve got so far.
The Julius Shulman photo found by ken mc reveals that, whatever the style of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium (I always thought it closer to streamline moderne than art deco), the Pan-Pacific Theatre was not art deco at all, but plain modern, maybe with some proto-googie touches (all those angular elements.) I’d guess that the Shulman photo dates from sometime around 1940. This entry needs a whole new introductory paragraph.
Ken: You’ve found the smoking gun! The Gaiety was definitely the Olympic/Alphin/Omar/Moon Theatre! That’s the same building that housed the Omar in the c1917 photo I linked to above. The rear of that parked car that shows on the left side of your picture looks like a very late 1930’s or early 1940’s model, so that’s the earliest this picture could have been taken. The Watts-bound streetcar bears the logo of the Pacific Electric Railroad, so it would be no later than the early 1950’s when both P.E. and L.A.Railway service was taken over by Metropolitan Transit Lines.
The fall of shadows indicates some time around mid-afternoon,probably near the summer solstice. Quite a few pedestrians coupled with little traffic suggests Sunday, and also gives a strong suggestion that this picture might have been taken during the war years when gasoline was being rationed. It’s too bad more of the marquee isn’t visible, showing the names of the movies, since they can give an earliest possible year for a theatre photo.
Ken: The Hollywood branch of Barker Bros. furniture store may have been an original tenant of the El Capitan building. Barker Bros. was L.A.’s major furniture emporium, founded about 1880 and closed in 1992. Their huge main store on 7th Street downtown was built in the 1920’s, but the company was always one of the city’s most progressive and may have planted a branch in Hollywood in that same period. I know that by the 1940’s, they had branches in many suburban shopping districts considerably less affluent than Hollywood.
It shows vary little, but a small photo on this page gives a partial glimpse of the Yam Theatre in its current state.
It opened as a playhouse with the name El Capitan, was later renamed the Paramount, and then the original name was restored by the Disney Company with their 1990’s renovation.
Ken: It was the other El Capitan, the one on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard, which was the venue for Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. At that time, the Hollywood Boulevard El Capitan was called the Paramount and was exclusively a movie house.
Ken: The first of those three photos certainly dates from the period just after the old State Normal School was demolished and just before the library was built. Fifth Street has not yet been connected between Grand and Flower. It looks as though it was under construction at the time the picture was taken. You can see that the hillside that later became the location of the big concrete wall has been partly graded.
Temple Baptist Church still owned the building at the time the second photo was taken, so they must have approved of the big Alka-Seltzer sign on the roof. It was the Philharmonic that was the tenant in the building.
Though it doesn’t look like it today, when Pershing Square was rebuilt following the construction of the underground garage the landscaping was quite pleasant. The large grassy section in the center featuring two fountains was off limits to the public, but the perimeter of the park featured both an inner and an outer walkway. The outer walkway was lined with planters whose walls were of a good height for sitting, and the inner walkway was lined with benches overlooking the central lawn, some of the bearing the quaint sign “Reserved for Ladies”. The place was busy all the time and, though many of the park’s regular denizens were of sorts thought by suburbanites to be unsavory, I was there many times and never felt in the least bit threatened by any of them (though I did frequently get panhandled and asked if I’d found Jesus yet.)
The planting was mostly tropical, with palms, banana trees and ferns, and the whole perimeter was quite lush and well shaded. This tropical landscape was lost to a bland renovation in the mid-1960s which was instigated by the administration of Mayor Sam Yorty, a resident of the San Fernando Valley who disliked the liveliness of downtown and did his best to destroy as many of its amenities as possible.
The Times Theatre was located in the auditorium of the Friday Morning Club, a womens' organization. The auditorium opened on Monday, May 5th, 1924, and was for several years a popular venue for plays, lectures and musical performances. It was used for club functions as well.
I’ve been unable to find during which years the Times Theatre operated, but it had long been closed by 1977, the year in which the building was sold by the Friday Morning Club to Milt Larsen and was converted into the not-for-profit Variety Arts Center, dedicated to preserving historic forms of live entertainment such as Vaudeville.
The five story Italian Renaissance style building was designed by the Los Angeles architectural firm of Allison & Allison. In addition to the large auditorium, it contains a smaller theatre (apparently never used as a movie house) and various meeting and club rooms. The building was declared a city monument in 1978, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
In 2004, the building was purchased by the Anshutz Entertainment Group, the company which is building the massive L.A. Live entertainment complex a few blocks farther south on Figueroa Street. For now, the theatre remains dark while the company studies options for reuse of the venue.
Here is a recent photograph of the Friday Morning Club building.
Ken: I found that they’ve given the Winter-Hunt site a new URL, but it’s to no avail. The text pages display, but clicking on the thumbnail photos still brings up nothing but the same thumbnails on individual pages.
Ken: The view in the picture to which you linked is east along Wilshire, and the theatre depicted is the Fox Ritz.
Here is a photo of Amarillo’s Esquire Theatre, from the Amarillo Public Library web site. There is information about the theatre on that page, too, but some of it it doesn’t match the information on this CT page. The address is given as 1808 South Washington, and the seating capacity is listed as 763. The date of the grand opening is given as October 24, 1947.
Also, it’s always a good idea when using BBS code to hit the “Preview” button first instead of the “Submit” button, and then test the link before submitting the post, to make sure it’s been set up right and that it actually works! I didn’t do that just now, and ended up using the wrong URL for my link! Here’s the right link to the CNET forum page: BBS Code.
D'OH!
This is not a duplicate listing. Jackson and Sutter Creek are two different cities. Whether or not the Jackson Ratto was later renamed the Jackson Theatre has not yet been established. A Jackson Theatre did exist in Jackson, but it is not listed at Cinema Treasures, and I haven’t found an address for it.
There were also Ratto Theatres in Ione and Plymouth and, from 1912 to 1919, the original Sutter Creek Ratto Theatre was located in a building (still extant) across the street from the theatre’s present location, so there were a total of five known Ratto Theatre locations altogether.
I’ve never met any of the Rattos, so I don’t know exactly how their name is pronounced. In Italy, it was probably pronounced more like “Rah-toh” and with the “R” trilled, but in California it might very well have ended up being pronounced Rat-oh.
The Rattos were among a large number of Italian families that were part of the cosmopolitan wave of immigrants settling in the Sierra foothills in the years after 1849. Amador County in particular attracted many Italian immigrants, and at one time Italians were the largest single group in the area. They remain numerous today.
Ken: I didn’t think anyone would ever unearth a picture of the Times Theatre,a nd that it was gone forever. But then, I didn’t know that the Times Theatre was actually located in the Friday Morning Club building, and thus was one and the same with the Variety Arts Center. Apparently neither did William when he posted this theatre, or he wouldn’t have listed it as being “closed, demolished”. The listing definitely needs an update. Thanks for digging up this happy news.
I’d say that the Times/Variety Arts has a bright future, being located in the new entertainment district that appears to be forming along south Figueroa Street. Now that we know it is the building of the Friday Morning Club, it seems likely that we could even find the name of the architect in the California Index at the L.A. Library web site.