rduff: I remember hearing older Pasadenans tell about the effect the passing trains had on the Tower. Unfortunately, the theatre was gone by the time I became familiar with Pasadena, so I never got to experience it firsthand.
I never got to see the Academy before its original Egyptian style was covered over in the 1957 remodeling. Cinema Treasures has a page for the Academy. (In fact, you can click the “Pasadena” link in the line just above the Tower Theatre name on this page, and it will open a page with a list of all the Pasadena theatres listed on the site so far.)
The Crest in Monrovia is listed at Cinema Treasures under its original name, the Lyric Theatre.
The Jazz Singer opened on October 6th, 1927 at the Warner Theatre in New York. The Jazz Singer was only partly sound, and was not the first movie with sound, but it was the first that made a big impression on the public, even though many theatres around the country ran an entirely silent version of the film. For the next couple of years, as theatres around the country were gradually wired for sound, they frequently ran the sound version of The Jazz Singer as their first presentation.
Wiring the nation’s thousands of theatres for sound was costly. Some of the big chains faced financial crisis, and many independent theatres simply went out of business at that time and closed forever. The situation was complicated by the fact that there were two competing systems in the early years of talkies- Fox’s Movietone sound-on-film system, and Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disk. Many theatres didn’t run either Vitaphone or Movietone films exclusively and had to install equipment for both. Eventually, the sound-on-film approach won out, of course.
The rebuilding of the El Monterey for Mrs. Martin in 1928 must have left a considerable official paper trail, and such a project was undoubtedly the subject of articles in local newspapers. Also, there must have been a newspaper advertisement for the re-opening of the theatre. I don’t know the condition of San Luis Obispo’s public archives, or if any of its newspapers' morgues from the era have been preserved, but it’s possible that something survives somewhere.
There now seems to be some question as to whether or not the Elmo was in fact the El Monterey. See Pat OD’s comment of May 25, 2006, on the Obispo Theatre page.
If the Obispo was the El Monterey, then it must have been opened under its original name before 1928, the year in which the reconstruction of the El Monterey was announced.
An article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of October 27, 1928, said that a permit had been issued for the reconstruction of the El Monterey Theatre. As the permit was issued so late in the year, and the project must have been fairly extensive (it was budgeted at $20,000), the theatre must not have opened as the Obispo until some time in 1929.
See the Elmo Theatre page for an earlier discussion regarding the El Monterey name.
This web page about Chattanooga’s Theatres gives a date of 1926 for the installation of the air conditioning plant in the Tivoli Theatre. The orginal source for this information is not cited on the page, but the date certainly fits well with the Historic American Buildings Survey’s claim that the Tivloi may have been one of the first five buildings in the U.S. to have an air conditioning plant. It seems quite possible that this claim was correct and that it was the date given in the HABS report that was an error. It still might be the other way around, of course, but typos and erroneous dates are both much more common in such documents than are extravagantly false claims.
Unfortunately, I’m even farther from Los Angeles than you are. I live in rural Northern California, about 70 miles from Sacramento. I only have access to the scanned cards in the L.A. library’s California Index on their web site, some of which contain excerpts from various SwB&C articles.
The L.A. library had a set of the magazines themselves until they were destroyed in the 1986 fire. Fortunately, the University of California at Santa Barbara had a set of the magazines, which they had already begun transferring to microfiche at the time of the fire. I think that most of the UC libraries have copies of the microfiche now.
The crest is interesting, but I don’t know of any specific connection between it and Pacific States Theaters. It might have been meant simply as decoration, and perhaps was copied from an actual historic coat of arms. I’m not too familiar with heraldry myself, but there are some web sites about it, such as Heraldry on the Internet, and you might find some information there to help you decipher the meanings of the various symbols on the Miramar’s crest.
I’ve found only a couple of references to Pacific States Theaters on-line. A few scanned cards at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index mention a company called Warner Brothers Pacific States Theatres, in connection with the Warner Brothers Theater in Sacramento and the Forum Theater in Los Angeles, and there is one card which mentions Pacific States Theatres (no mention of Warner Bros. in this instance) as the owners of the La Mar Theater in Manhattan Beach. All these mentions are from the 1930’s, and all cite issues of the trade publication Southwest Builder & Contractor.
Mark Campbell: The current proscenium of the Tower is not where the CinemaScope screen was located. The wide screen was placed several feet in front of the old screen’s location, and surrounded with drapes that closed off the stage end of the theater. This was done in the early 1950’s. The 1965 renovation didn’t involve any major structural changes to the auditorium, though some canvas murals that had been in the ceiling dome were removed and the wall murals were covered over.
Raad: While there’s a lot of information on-line about S. Charles Lee, information about L.A. Smith and Clifford Balch is still rare. I’ve actually never heard anything about a connection between Lee and Smith before, but there’s so little information available about Smith that I’m unable to either confirm or deny that such a connection existed.
As for the photograph, the image posting feature at Cinema Treasures hasn’t been available for a couple of years. I don’t know when they’ll get it fixed. In the meantime, the best way to share a picture is to post it on another web site, such as Webshots or Photobucket (both offer limited free image hosting) and then post a link to the picture here.
Raadg: I’m wondering about the source of your information on the relationship between L.A. Smith and S. Charles Lee. Lee was born in 1899, studied in Chicago, worked there in the offices of Rapp & Rapp, and only arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, just a couple of years before the much older Lewis Smith died. I can imagine the relationship the other way around, but it’s difficult to picture an established architect being mentored by a kid in his twenties.
This page at the web site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has an article from 2002 which features a picture showing the water damage in the auditorium of the Capitol Theatre.
A minor point (and not relevant to the theatre discussion), but if Tim Lucas is still around, someone might let him know that he was paying six bits), not three bits, for his movie tickets. A quarter was two bits, and thus the once-common phrase “two-bit grind house” arose to describe theatres showing triple features all day and night for a quarter.
ziggy: I was hoping that somebody would make it to one of the Lyric Opera’s performances and post about it here. What sort of seat were you able to get at the last minute? Did you notice if they opened the second balcony or not? How are the acoustics for a live performance? I’ve only ever been there for movies, and I’ve always wondered if the theatre sounds as good as it looks.
On a recent visit to the official web site of the Los Angeles Theatre, when I clicked on the “Other Locations” link at the top of the page, I saw that the State Theatre was listed, along with the William Fox Building. Apparently, these two properties have been added to the holdings of Michael Delijani’s Delson Investment Company. As the Delson Company has been doing an excellent job with the restoration of the Los Angeles Theatre, and has plans to restore the Palace Theatre as well, this seems a very hopeful sign for the State Theatre.
The web site of the Cooper Union’s School of Architecture has an interesting page about the 42nd Street development of which the former Liberty Theatre is now a part.
The architectural firm which designed the AMC Empire 25 and the adaptation of the Eltinge Theatre as its entrance and lobby was Gould Evans Associates, the Lawrence, Kansas based firm which has designed the majority of AMC’s recent megaplex theatres.
Here is an interesting page about Forest City Ratner’s 42nd Street development, at the Cooper Union School of Architecture’s web site. It gives a good description of the way this complex development is put together.
ELS Architecture, the site of the firm that did the restoration. Click on “Portfolio” then “Entertainment/Arts” then “California Theatre.” Requires flash.
One of the theatres in Lindsay was built in 1933, to replace an earlier theatre on the site which had burned. According to an article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of April 28, 1933, the architect of the new building was Albert Schroepfer of San Francisco. No address was given for the theatre, though.
Whether the theatre in the article was this one or the Grove, down the street, is moot, but I’m leaning toward this one, as this photograph of the Grove shows a side wall that looks as though it was built of concrete block, which would suggest a more recent date of construction than 1933- perhaps the 1950’s, when concrete block construction became quite common. Also, the offset entrance and the angled marquee have a very 1950’s look.
The Lindsay Community Theatre, despite recent renovations, simply looks like an older building, of the sort that would have been built in the 1930’s, with a centered entrance, tile trim, and a balcony. If someone could find the opening date of either or both theatres, we could be certain which was which.
I see the source of the confusion over the Earle Theatre’s architect. It was the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., opened in 1924 as the Earle Theatre, that was designed by Baltimore architect John J. Zink.
rduff: I remember hearing older Pasadenans tell about the effect the passing trains had on the Tower. Unfortunately, the theatre was gone by the time I became familiar with Pasadena, so I never got to experience it firsthand.
I never got to see the Academy before its original Egyptian style was covered over in the 1957 remodeling. Cinema Treasures has a page for the Academy. (In fact, you can click the “Pasadena” link in the line just above the Tower Theatre name on this page, and it will open a page with a list of all the Pasadena theatres listed on the site so far.)
The Crest in Monrovia is listed at Cinema Treasures under its original name, the Lyric Theatre.
Pat OD:
The Jazz Singer opened on October 6th, 1927 at the Warner Theatre in New York. The Jazz Singer was only partly sound, and was not the first movie with sound, but it was the first that made a big impression on the public, even though many theatres around the country ran an entirely silent version of the film. For the next couple of years, as theatres around the country were gradually wired for sound, they frequently ran the sound version of The Jazz Singer as their first presentation.
Wiring the nation’s thousands of theatres for sound was costly. Some of the big chains faced financial crisis, and many independent theatres simply went out of business at that time and closed forever. The situation was complicated by the fact that there were two competing systems in the early years of talkies- Fox’s Movietone sound-on-film system, and Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disk. Many theatres didn’t run either Vitaphone or Movietone films exclusively and had to install equipment for both. Eventually, the sound-on-film approach won out, of course.
The rebuilding of the El Monterey for Mrs. Martin in 1928 must have left a considerable official paper trail, and such a project was undoubtedly the subject of articles in local newspapers. Also, there must have been a newspaper advertisement for the re-opening of the theatre. I don’t know the condition of San Luis Obispo’s public archives, or if any of its newspapers' morgues from the era have been preserved, but it’s possible that something survives somewhere.
There now seems to be some question as to whether or not the Elmo was in fact the El Monterey. See Pat OD’s comment of May 25, 2006, on the Obispo Theatre page.
Pat OD:
If the Obispo was the El Monterey, then it must have been opened under its original name before 1928, the year in which the reconstruction of the El Monterey was announced.
An article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of October 27, 1928, said that a permit had been issued for the reconstruction of the El Monterey Theatre. As the permit was issued so late in the year, and the project must have been fairly extensive (it was budgeted at $20,000), the theatre must not have opened as the Obispo until some time in 1929.
See the Elmo Theatre page for an earlier discussion regarding the El Monterey name.
This web page about Chattanooga’s Theatres gives a date of 1926 for the installation of the air conditioning plant in the Tivoli Theatre. The orginal source for this information is not cited on the page, but the date certainly fits well with the Historic American Buildings Survey’s claim that the Tivloi may have been one of the first five buildings in the U.S. to have an air conditioning plant. It seems quite possible that this claim was correct and that it was the date given in the HABS report that was an error. It still might be the other way around, of course, but typos and erroneous dates are both much more common in such documents than are extravagantly false claims.
Raad,
Unfortunately, I’m even farther from Los Angeles than you are. I live in rural Northern California, about 70 miles from Sacramento. I only have access to the scanned cards in the L.A. library’s California Index on their web site, some of which contain excerpts from various SwB&C articles.
The L.A. library had a set of the magazines themselves until they were destroyed in the 1986 fire. Fortunately, the University of California at Santa Barbara had a set of the magazines, which they had already begun transferring to microfiche at the time of the fire. I think that most of the UC libraries have copies of the microfiche now.
Radd,
The crest is interesting, but I don’t know of any specific connection between it and Pacific States Theaters. It might have been meant simply as decoration, and perhaps was copied from an actual historic coat of arms. I’m not too familiar with heraldry myself, but there are some web sites about it, such as Heraldry on the Internet, and you might find some information there to help you decipher the meanings of the various symbols on the Miramar’s crest.
I’ve found only a couple of references to Pacific States Theaters on-line. A few scanned cards at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index mention a company called Warner Brothers Pacific States Theatres, in connection with the Warner Brothers Theater in Sacramento and the Forum Theater in Los Angeles, and there is one card which mentions Pacific States Theatres (no mention of Warner Bros. in this instance) as the owners of the La Mar Theater in Manhattan Beach. All these mentions are from the 1930’s, and all cite issues of the trade publication Southwest Builder & Contractor.
Plans for construction of the Starland Theatre were announced in the Los Angeles Times issue of September 22, 1912.
The demolition of the theatre was announced in the July 25, 1968 issue of the Lincoln Heights Bulletin-News.
Mark Campbell: The current proscenium of the Tower is not where the CinemaScope screen was located. The wide screen was placed several feet in front of the old screen’s location, and surrounded with drapes that closed off the stage end of the theater. This was done in the early 1950’s. The 1965 renovation didn’t involve any major structural changes to the auditorium, though some canvas murals that had been in the ceiling dome were removed and the wall murals were covered over.
Raad: While there’s a lot of information on-line about S. Charles Lee, information about L.A. Smith and Clifford Balch is still rare. I’ve actually never heard anything about a connection between Lee and Smith before, but there’s so little information available about Smith that I’m unable to either confirm or deny that such a connection existed.
As for the photograph, the image posting feature at Cinema Treasures hasn’t been available for a couple of years. I don’t know when they’ll get it fixed. In the meantime, the best way to share a picture is to post it on another web site, such as Webshots or Photobucket (both offer limited free image hosting) and then post a link to the picture here.
Raadg: I’m wondering about the source of your information on the relationship between L.A. Smith and S. Charles Lee. Lee was born in 1899, studied in Chicago, worked there in the offices of Rapp & Rapp, and only arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, just a couple of years before the much older Lewis Smith died. I can imagine the relationship the other way around, but it’s difficult to picture an established architect being mentored by a kid in his twenties.
The architect of the Bellevue was Henry Carl Messerschmidt, who also designed the Lee Theater, now called the Grace Street Theater.
The Henrico Theatre last showed a movie in 1996, according to this 2002 article about the attempted renovation of the theatre.
The Henrico Theatre was designed by Richmond architect Edward Sinnott Sr.
The original architect of the 1912 Moolah Temple was Ernest Helfensteller.
Plans for the restoration were by Trivers & Associates, and interior design was by Kevin Kerwin, AIA, of HKW Architects, and by Checkmate Design.
This page at the web site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has an article from 2002 which features a picture showing the water damage in the auditorium of the Capitol Theatre.
A minor point (and not relevant to the theatre discussion), but if Tim Lucas is still around, someone might let him know that he was paying six bits), not three bits, for his movie tickets. A quarter was two bits, and thus the once-common phrase “two-bit grind house” arose to describe theatres showing triple features all day and night for a quarter.
The No Nothing Cinema has been reborn in another location as the New Nothing Cinema.
I’m glad to see that the No Nothing Cinema has been reborn in a new location.
ziggy: I was hoping that somebody would make it to one of the Lyric Opera’s performances and post about it here. What sort of seat were you able to get at the last minute? Did you notice if they opened the second balcony or not? How are the acoustics for a live performance? I’ve only ever been there for movies, and I’ve always wondered if the theatre sounds as good as it looks.
On a recent visit to the official web site of the Los Angeles Theatre, when I clicked on the “Other Locations” link at the top of the page, I saw that the State Theatre was listed, along with the William Fox Building. Apparently, these two properties have been added to the holdings of Michael Delijani’s Delson Investment Company. As the Delson Company has been doing an excellent job with the restoration of the Los Angeles Theatre, and has plans to restore the Palace Theatre as well, this seems a very hopeful sign for the State Theatre.
The web site of the Cooper Union’s School of Architecture has an interesting page about the 42nd Street development of which the former Liberty Theatre is now a part.
The architectural firm which designed the AMC Empire 25 and the adaptation of the Eltinge Theatre as its entrance and lobby was Gould Evans Associates, the Lawrence, Kansas based firm which has designed the majority of AMC’s recent megaplex theatres.
Here is an interesting page about Forest City Ratner’s 42nd Street development, at the Cooper Union School of Architecture’s web site. It gives a good description of the way this complex development is put together.
Interesting links:
California Theatre Notes and Architectural Fact Sheet, with photos, and a link to LOTS more photos at the bottom of the page.
ELS Architecture, the site of the firm that did the restoration. Click on “Portfolio” then “Entertainment/Arts” then “California Theatre.” Requires flash.
One of the theatres in Lindsay was built in 1933, to replace an earlier theatre on the site which had burned. According to an article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of April 28, 1933, the architect of the new building was Albert Schroepfer of San Francisco. No address was given for the theatre, though.
Whether the theatre in the article was this one or the Grove, down the street, is moot, but I’m leaning toward this one, as this photograph of the Grove shows a side wall that looks as though it was built of concrete block, which would suggest a more recent date of construction than 1933- perhaps the 1950’s, when concrete block construction became quite common. Also, the offset entrance and the angled marquee have a very 1950’s look.
The Lindsay Community Theatre, despite recent renovations, simply looks like an older building, of the sort that would have been built in the 1930’s, with a centered entrance, tile trim, and a balcony. If someone could find the opening date of either or both theatres, we could be certain which was which.
I see the source of the confusion over the Earle Theatre’s architect. It was the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., opened in 1924 as the Earle Theatre, that was designed by Baltimore architect John J. Zink.