The Emporis Buildings web site (usually pretty reliable) lists both C. Howard Crane and the firm of Zink, Adkins & Craycroft as architects of the Warner.
Dennis, Cinema Treasures didn’t send me an e-mail notification of your last comment, so I didn’t find out it was here until tonight. I’ve been refreshing my memory of the entries for Alhambra’s theatres so I can ask questions about them of the members of classmates.com’s Alhambra High School contingent (Classmates recently re-opened their message boards to posting by non-paying members of the site.) Although I went to Mark Keppel High School, members can use the boards for any of the schools on the site.
Since my last post, I’ve found a couple of old pictures of Alhambra on the web, and one of them shows the corner of Garfield and Main in the 1920’s. It turns out that the Owl drug store was in the three story building on the northeast corner of Garfield and Main, so the Thrifty must have been in the one story building on the northwest corner. I think I was momentarily confused about their relative positions because the Owl Drug Store at the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado in Pasadena was on the northwest corner of that intersection.
Also, re-reading my comments above, I don’t think I answered your question about where I lived in those days. It was in the south end of South San Gabriel, almost into Potrero Heights. When the wind was in the south, we could smell the oil wells in the Montebello Hills.
The Argus Theatre was designed by Los Angeles architect A.L.Valk. It was a conversion and expansion of an existing retail building, and was announced in the March 20, 1913 issue of Builder & Contractor magazine.
Arthur Lawrence Valk was referred to as a “…motion picture specialist….” in an article in the October 11, 1913 issue of Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer magazine, at the time he closed his office and joined in a partnership with his father, architect Lawrence Bolton Valk.
The Fox Figueroa Theatre was built in 1925. The architect was W.S. Hebbard. The theatre was mentioned in issues of the magazine Southwest Builder & Contractor of ½/25, 2/27/25, and 12/11/25. William Sterling Hebbard (1868-1930) was a San Diego architect, who sometimes worked in partnership with Irving Gill.
The announcement of the UC Theatre was made in the October, 1916 issue of Architect & Engineer magazine. The owners were given as Messrs. Bradshaw and Williamson. The projected cost of the theatre was $100,000. The architect was James W. Plachek (1893-1948.)
Quite a few theatres west of the Mississippi had been showing talking pictures for quite a while before the Granada opened, since the first all-talking movies were released in 1928. I suspect that the claim for the Granada is that it was the first theatre west of the Mississippi to be newly built and opened with a sound system already in place.
vokoban: I just found these comments. I must have overlooked the e-mail notification. The dictionary at Answers.com says that “inst.” is simply and abbreviation for “instant”, which does itself come from Latin.
Unfortunately, the Batchelder site to which you linked has gone missing. Fortunately, it has been partly preserved by the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Copy the Chocolate Shoppe URL and paste it into the Wayback Machine’s search box to get links to the surviving fragments of the site.
I found a picture at the USC archives a while ago, taken in 1913, which shows a view from Hill Street across rooftops toward Broadway. It shows that the two tall buildings currently to the south of the Palace theatre were already there, but only shows their upper floors, so there’s no indication of a theatre being in either of them. I went looking for the picture again (I saved it, but not the text page that goes with it), but can’t find it on the site now. Their text pages sometimes mention what was in the various buildings at the time the picture was taken.
The Harkins Superstition Springs 25 was designed by Paul John Ladensack, of the Phoenix firm CCBG Architects. The design won an Award of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1998.
Two pictures of the theatre can be seen on this page (thumbnails: will open pop-up windows.)
Universal City Cinemas was designed by Mesbur+Smith Architects, of Toronto, Canada. There are three pictures of the interior on this page. The two largest auditoriums in the complex each opened with 750 seats, and the total seating of the complex was over 6000.
The theatre no longer carries the Cineplex Odeon name. It was called the Loews Universal City 18 for a while, but it is now called the Universal Studio Cinemas, and is operated by AMC, which has swallowed Loews.
Does the movie smell like Colin Farrell? That’s a disturbing thought. I’ve never seen him in person, but in his appearances on T.V. talk shows, he usually has sort of a seedy, boozy look. Now I’m imagining a nice, tidy Japanese theatre being filled with a smell redolent of one of those old skid row grind houses where bums used to sleep off their drunks.
ken mc: I thought I’d replied to your question about the State Theatre long ago, but I must have hit the “preview” button instead of the “Post” button. D'OH!
Anyway- The Stockton Empire was in a fairly suburban location some distance north of downtown Stockton. The pictures of the State show it being in a dense, urban area, with a tall building next door, so it must not be the same theatre.
Jim’s mention of stock photos reminded me that for several decades in Los Angeles, the commercial photographer Dick Whittington documented a great many of the city’s businesses. The collection consists primarily of negatives, and is one of several collections currently held by the University of Southern California Archival Research Center. I’m not sure how large the collection is, or how it is indexed, but it’s one more option to consider.
Carey: I’ve never searched for anything in the L.A. Building and Safety Department’s records, so I don’t know how their filing system is set up. Did you search by the theatre’s name, or by address? Sometimes bureaucratic filing systems are inconsistent over the years. There might be records filed under the name of the retail tenants, or the name of the building owner (personal or corporate), or by the address of the retail store rather than the address of the theatre. Many times, an institution’s initial claim that they don’t have a particular bit of information turns out to be wrong, and digging deeper will unearth it.
ken mc: Are the directories in that room on open shelves? It’s possible that they keep the L.A. directories in a closed area, and available only on request, as they’d probably be the most popular, and thus the ones most likely to become damaged or lost if kept on open shelves. Also, a lot of the old reference materials in the library have been put in storage after being made available on microfilm or microfiche. The library’s web site contains a City Directories Index search page, but I haven’t figured out how to use it.
Carey: The L.A. Public Library’s on-line photo database contains at least these two pictures of the Palace, c1928, with the “Broadway Palace” name on it:
The information about the name “News Palace” (adopted in 1939) is covered in my comment of Dec. 8, 2004, near the top of this page. I’ve never seen the Daily Variety article itself; only the index card displayed in the California Index section of the L.A. Library web site.
Carey: Though I undoubtedly saw the facade before 1952, I don’t remember what it looked like. My mom tells me that we went to the Los Angeles a couple of times in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but my only early memories of any downtown theatres are of the Warner Brother’s and the RKO Hillstreet. My first memory of the facade of the Los Angeles is from about 1960.
I don’t remember what retailers were in the north wing storefronts in 1960, but by 1963 I know there was one of those cheap electronics dealers in one of them, because I bought a radio from them. Whatever company had caused the remodeling to be done was probably gone by then. I’ve always suspected that the owners of the building had allowed the remodeling to be done by a tenant- probably some time in the 1940’s, as that plain style of facade was popular with retailers during that decade. An old city directory (many are available at the downtown library) would give the name of the store’s occupant(s) during that time.
I’m glad to hear that you intend to restore the facade. It’s always bothered me that the north and south wings don’t match.
DanW: “The 2wenty” is the name Regal Entertainment Group has given to the twenty minutes of ads and movie trailers that precede the feature in almost all of their theatres. By giving it what they appear to think is a hip&trendy name, they can pretend that it’s part of the show instead of just a bunch of advertising. They even have a web site for it.
Bill Kallay: The relationship of Southern California’s Edwards theatres and the Los Angeles Times goes back for ages. I remember seeing the Times ad (about 15 seconds long) every week at the various Edwards theatres I attended in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1950’s. It was the only ad the theatres ran (aside from their usual popcorn plug), and the word was that The Times gave free advertising space in the paper for any theatres that ran Times ads on their screens.
I’ve come across a card displayed in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index which refers to an article in the Los Angeles Times of May 14, 1922, which says that the Gore Brothers were going to lease the Omar Theatre on Main Street. That’s the latest date for any reference to the Omar name that I have found so far.
cmcc: As operators of the Cairo, I suspect that the Hansens were owners of the business, though not necessarily of the building (many theatres were built by speculators and then leased to operators.) Most small suburban theatres such as the Cairo were not operated by circuits, but by independent business people. ronp’s comments on the Atlantic Theatre indicate that the Hansens actually owned that theatre building, but say only that they “operated” the Cairo. Whether they owned the Cairo building or not, it seems likely that they were the independent owners of the business, at least until 1941.
cmmc: The first comment above by ronp says that Ivan and Eula Hanson ran the Cairo for 12 years before they built the Atlantic Theatre in Long Beach in 1941, so they must have been the operators in 1933.
I didn’t know there was a Mickey Mouse Club as early as 1933. I searched on Google, and found that the first Mickey Mouse Club of the era was formed at the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park, California in 1929. In 1932 the club reached one million members. (This information from an official Disney Company page.)
Here is a link to a PDF file (only 180K, so easily downloaded) which is mostly about copyright law, and apparently has to do with a court case, but which discusses the early Micky Mouse Clubs for several pages, beginning on page 10.
Just so everybody will know: I’m NOT related to Mike Vogel.
If the building the theatre is in has 40,000 square feet, then four million dollars doesn’t seem an excessive price. The citizens of Anchorage are passing up a bargain. Their descendants will regret this lost opportunity.
The Emporis Buildings web site (usually pretty reliable) lists both C. Howard Crane and the firm of Zink, Adkins & Craycroft as architects of the Warner.
Dennis, Cinema Treasures didn’t send me an e-mail notification of your last comment, so I didn’t find out it was here until tonight. I’ve been refreshing my memory of the entries for Alhambra’s theatres so I can ask questions about them of the members of classmates.com’s Alhambra High School contingent (Classmates recently re-opened their message boards to posting by non-paying members of the site.) Although I went to Mark Keppel High School, members can use the boards for any of the schools on the site.
Since my last post, I’ve found a couple of old pictures of Alhambra on the web, and one of them shows the corner of Garfield and Main in the 1920’s. It turns out that the Owl drug store was in the three story building on the northeast corner of Garfield and Main, so the Thrifty must have been in the one story building on the northwest corner. I think I was momentarily confused about their relative positions because the Owl Drug Store at the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado in Pasadena was on the northwest corner of that intersection.
Also, re-reading my comments above, I don’t think I answered your question about where I lived in those days. It was in the south end of South San Gabriel, almost into Potrero Heights. When the wind was in the south, we could smell the oil wells in the Montebello Hills.
The Argus Theatre was designed by Los Angeles architect A.L.Valk. It was a conversion and expansion of an existing retail building, and was announced in the March 20, 1913 issue of Builder & Contractor magazine.
Arthur Lawrence Valk was referred to as a “…motion picture specialist….” in an article in the October 11, 1913 issue of Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer magazine, at the time he closed his office and joined in a partnership with his father, architect Lawrence Bolton Valk.
The Fox Figueroa Theatre was built in 1925. The architect was W.S. Hebbard. The theatre was mentioned in issues of the magazine Southwest Builder & Contractor of ½/25, 2/27/25, and 12/11/25. William Sterling Hebbard (1868-1930) was a San Diego architect, who sometimes worked in partnership with Irving Gill.
The announcement of the UC Theatre was made in the October, 1916 issue of Architect & Engineer magazine. The owners were given as Messrs. Bradshaw and Williamson. The projected cost of the theatre was $100,000. The architect was James W. Plachek (1893-1948.)
Quite a few theatres west of the Mississippi had been showing talking pictures for quite a while before the Granada opened, since the first all-talking movies were released in 1928. I suspect that the claim for the Granada is that it was the first theatre west of the Mississippi to be newly built and opened with a sound system already in place.
Different Paris Theatre, strawberry. The Carmel/Paris was on Santa Monica Boulevard and the other was on Hollywood Boulevard across from the Pantages.
vokoban: I just found these comments. I must have overlooked the e-mail notification. The dictionary at Answers.com says that “inst.” is simply and abbreviation for “instant”, which does itself come from Latin.
Unfortunately, the Batchelder site to which you linked has gone missing. Fortunately, it has been partly preserved by the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Copy the Chocolate Shoppe URL and paste it into the Wayback Machine’s search box to get links to the surviving fragments of the site.
I found a picture at the USC archives a while ago, taken in 1913, which shows a view from Hill Street across rooftops toward Broadway. It shows that the two tall buildings currently to the south of the Palace theatre were already there, but only shows their upper floors, so there’s no indication of a theatre being in either of them. I went looking for the picture again (I saved it, but not the text page that goes with it), but can’t find it on the site now. Their text pages sometimes mention what was in the various buildings at the time the picture was taken.
The architect of the 1996 expansion and renovation of the Harkins Christown 11 Cinemas was Scott Walker of the Phoenix based firm CCBG Architects.
The Harkins Superstition Springs 25 was designed by Paul John Ladensack, of the Phoenix firm CCBG Architects. The design won an Award of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1998.
Two pictures of the theatre can be seen on this page (thumbnails: will open pop-up windows.)
Universal City Cinemas was designed by Mesbur+Smith Architects, of Toronto, Canada. There are three pictures of the interior on this page. The two largest auditoriums in the complex each opened with 750 seats, and the total seating of the complex was over 6000.
The theatre no longer carries the Cineplex Odeon name. It was called the Loews Universal City 18 for a while, but it is now called the Universal Studio Cinemas, and is operated by AMC, which has swallowed Loews.
Does the movie smell like Colin Farrell? That’s a disturbing thought. I’ve never seen him in person, but in his appearances on T.V. talk shows, he usually has sort of a seedy, boozy look. Now I’m imagining a nice, tidy Japanese theatre being filled with a smell redolent of one of those old skid row grind houses where bums used to sleep off their drunks.
The Century Theatres Evanston megaplex was designed by the San Diego architectural firm, Fehlman LaBarre. It contains 3400 seats.
ken mc: I thought I’d replied to your question about the State Theatre long ago, but I must have hit the “preview” button instead of the “Post” button. D'OH!
Anyway- The Stockton Empire was in a fairly suburban location some distance north of downtown Stockton. The pictures of the State show it being in a dense, urban area, with a tall building next door, so it must not be the same theatre.
Jim’s mention of stock photos reminded me that for several decades in Los Angeles, the commercial photographer Dick Whittington documented a great many of the city’s businesses. The collection consists primarily of negatives, and is one of several collections currently held by the University of Southern California Archival Research Center. I’m not sure how large the collection is, or how it is indexed, but it’s one more option to consider.
Carey: I’ve never searched for anything in the L.A. Building and Safety Department’s records, so I don’t know how their filing system is set up. Did you search by the theatre’s name, or by address? Sometimes bureaucratic filing systems are inconsistent over the years. There might be records filed under the name of the retail tenants, or the name of the building owner (personal or corporate), or by the address of the retail store rather than the address of the theatre. Many times, an institution’s initial claim that they don’t have a particular bit of information turns out to be wrong, and digging deeper will unearth it.
ken mc: Are the directories in that room on open shelves? It’s possible that they keep the L.A. directories in a closed area, and available only on request, as they’d probably be the most popular, and thus the ones most likely to become damaged or lost if kept on open shelves. Also, a lot of the old reference materials in the library have been put in storage after being made available on microfilm or microfiche. The library’s web site contains a City Directories Index search page, but I haven’t figured out how to use it.
Carey: The L.A. Public Library’s on-line photo database contains at least these two pictures of the Palace, c1928, with the “Broadway Palace” name on it:
Front View
Side View.
The information about the name “News Palace” (adopted in 1939) is covered in my comment of Dec. 8, 2004, near the top of this page. I’ve never seen the Daily Variety article itself; only the index card displayed in the California Index section of the L.A. Library web site.
Carey: Though I undoubtedly saw the facade before 1952, I don’t remember what it looked like. My mom tells me that we went to the Los Angeles a couple of times in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but my only early memories of any downtown theatres are of the Warner Brother’s and the RKO Hillstreet. My first memory of the facade of the Los Angeles is from about 1960.
I don’t remember what retailers were in the north wing storefronts in 1960, but by 1963 I know there was one of those cheap electronics dealers in one of them, because I bought a radio from them. Whatever company had caused the remodeling to be done was probably gone by then. I’ve always suspected that the owners of the building had allowed the remodeling to be done by a tenant- probably some time in the 1940’s, as that plain style of facade was popular with retailers during that decade. An old city directory (many are available at the downtown library) would give the name of the store’s occupant(s) during that time.
I’m glad to hear that you intend to restore the facade. It’s always bothered me that the north and south wings don’t match.
DanW: “The 2wenty” is the name Regal Entertainment Group has given to the twenty minutes of ads and movie trailers that precede the feature in almost all of their theatres. By giving it what they appear to think is a hip&trendy name, they can pretend that it’s part of the show instead of just a bunch of advertising. They even have a web site for it.
Bill Kallay: The relationship of Southern California’s Edwards theatres and the Los Angeles Times goes back for ages. I remember seeing the Times ad (about 15 seconds long) every week at the various Edwards theatres I attended in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1950’s. It was the only ad the theatres ran (aside from their usual popcorn plug), and the word was that The Times gave free advertising space in the paper for any theatres that ran Times ads on their screens.
I’ve come across a card displayed in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index which refers to an article in the Los Angeles Times of May 14, 1922, which says that the Gore Brothers were going to lease the Omar Theatre on Main Street. That’s the latest date for any reference to the Omar name that I have found so far.
cmcc: As operators of the Cairo, I suspect that the Hansens were owners of the business, though not necessarily of the building (many theatres were built by speculators and then leased to operators.) Most small suburban theatres such as the Cairo were not operated by circuits, but by independent business people. ronp’s comments on the Atlantic Theatre indicate that the Hansens actually owned that theatre building, but say only that they “operated” the Cairo. Whether they owned the Cairo building or not, it seems likely that they were the independent owners of the business, at least until 1941.
cmmc: The first comment above by ronp says that Ivan and Eula Hanson ran the Cairo for 12 years before they built the Atlantic Theatre in Long Beach in 1941, so they must have been the operators in 1933.
I didn’t know there was a Mickey Mouse Club as early as 1933. I searched on Google, and found that the first Mickey Mouse Club of the era was formed at the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park, California in 1929. In 1932 the club reached one million members. (This information from an official Disney Company page.)
Here is a link to a PDF file (only 180K, so easily downloaded) which is mostly about copyright law, and apparently has to do with a court case, but which discusses the early Micky Mouse Clubs for several pages, beginning on page 10.
Just so everybody will know: I’m NOT related to Mike Vogel.
If the building the theatre is in has 40,000 square feet, then four million dollars doesn’t seem an excessive price. The citizens of Anchorage are passing up a bargain. Their descendants will regret this lost opportunity.
The Alhambra Theater was designated an official San Francisco landmark on February 21, 1996.