This house opened sometime around 1920 as the New Lincoln Theatre. According to the “Walking Tour” brochure I picked up at the Downtown Pleasanton website, it was built about 1920 in the Mission Revival style. The brochure says that it became the Roxy in the 1940s, but the California Index has other information.
Issues of Motion Picture Herald from July 25 and August 22 of 1936 reveal that at that time the theatre was sold by Charles Chicazola to James B. Lima, and Lima then changed the name to Roxy (though Cal Index spells it “Roxie”.) The Downtown Pleasanton brochure gives the current address of the building as 641 Main.
The brochure also mentions two other theatres which once existed in downtown Pleasanton, both of which occupied buildings that are still standing:
1) 511 Main Street, built 1910, opened as the Gem Theatre and later became the Lincoln Theatre. No word on what happened at this site after the New Lincoln Theatre opened ca.1920.
2) A mission revival building at 720-722 Main was built as an auto showroom and garage ca.1920, but in 1945 was converted into the Rancho Theatre, “a Spanish movie house.”
California Index says that the Dixon Theatre got mentioned in the Better Theatres Section of Motion Picture Herald, May 1, 1937. A remodeling perhaps? Anyway, the Google Maps satellite view shows the address as being in the middle of a block of buildings in Dixon’s old downtown, so I’d say closed, not demolished.
Though the theatre itself advertises its location as Anaheim Hills, Anaheim Hills is not a separate city but a section of the City of Anaheim, and the location of this theatre will not map correctly on Google Maps unless you change the name from Anaheim Hills to Anaheim.
The chain which opened this multiplex was Sanborn Theatres, operating as SoCal Cinemas. The theatre continues to present special movie events that are provided under the name The Movie Experience by Sanborn Theatres. However, the company which provided the seats for the recent reconstruction into a stadium-seating configuration says on a popup from this page that Cinema City is operated by Starlight Cinemas, and a sidebar includes an encomium from Daniel Akarakian, President of Akarakian Theatres, indicating that he runs the place. Confusion.
Cinemapolis opened with two of its ten auditoriums equipped for 70mm presentations. Since the renovation, it has advertised all-digital projection, so I’m guessing the 70mm equipment is gone. The original seating capacity of the largest theatre in the complex was 500, but the reconfiguration for stadium seating has probably reduced that.
The date given for this photo is April 26, 1964, which is undoubtedly wrong. Not only was the the Center long gone by then, but “The Voice of Firestone” aired on NBC only from September, 1949 until June, 1954.
It says (among other things) that the theatre was designed by Denver architect Charles Strong; was operated by the Fox Intermountain Amusement Company; was opened on October 30, 1946; closed as movie theatre following a fire on November 18, 1981; was renovated for use as an arts center in 1984. It also says that the original auditorium was, like its replacement, a quonset structure.
Quite a few quonset-style theatres were built in the late 1940s. I know of three that were built in the San Gabriel Valley area est of Los Angeles alone: Clarence J. Smale’s Colorado Theatrein Pasadena, and S. Charles Lee’s Star Theatre in La Puente and Garmar Theatre in Montebello. Cinema Treasures currently lists 47 theatres as being in quonsets (the Aurora Fox is not yet on the list, by the way), and is probably missing about as many.
This scan of a 1950s ad from the Ed Dobbins collection at CinemaTour also shows the address of the Grand as having been 511 S. Conkling Street. I notice that Cinema Treasures currently has it as 508 S, so that needs changing. Put the Grand back on the correct side of the street, guys!
As the photos show a building not on a corner, an address of 400 would be very unlikely. Also, the old ad on Kilduffs page shows the address as 511 S. Conkling. Baltimore County Public Library’s page must be the one that got it wrong. It’s nice to know that L.A.’s public library isn’t the only one that attaches the wrong information to its photos.
Joe Vogel
commented about
Kulton
Feb 4, 2008 at 6:09 pm
What’s going up across the street from the new ImagineAsian Center is the Los Angeles Police Department’s motor pool building. It will essentially be just a big garage, but the LAPD grudgingly consented to allowing some retail space on the ground floor along Main Street. The project will contribute few actual users to the street, but plenty of motor traffic. It’s just the latest blob to ooze from the civic center into what used to be downtown, and will probably prove to be one of the more destructive.
It’s probably not a drawing, either, technically speaking, but a scan of a photo of a rendering. I think we should all agree to blame CinemaTour for the confusion.
From the photo of this theatre at CinemaTour, it looks to be 1930s moderne in design. That, and the fact that Shafter has never been a very large town and has thus probably never had multiple theatres built during a given decade, makes it likely that the item from Southwest Builder & Contractor issue of March 5, 1937, cited on this card at the California Index refers to the State.
The card does say the theatre was being built for a Mr. Panero, and that it would be 50'x150', which would just about accommodate the seating capacity of 550 cited above. My guess is that the State is the theatre designed by the Bakersfield firm of Franklin & Kump in 1937. Viewing the theatre’s address on TerraServer (1994 aerial photo) or on Google Maps' satellite view (a more recent picture) it looks as though they both put their markers off a bit, by about half a block. I think the State must be the building adjacent to the alley in the next block northwest of the markers.
To find the width of a screen of given height you multiply the aspect ratio by the height. Thus, 30'(1.33)=39.9'. A proper Academy ratio screen would have been 30'(1.37)=41.1'.
I was still eight years old when the first CinemaScope movie (The Robe) was released in the U.S. in September, 1953, so I saw many movies on Academy ratio theatre screens. A few of these were in big theatres in Downtown Los Angeles, but my memories of those theatres in their pre-CinemaScope days are dim. I do recall seeing High Barbaree at the 2890 seat RKO Hillstreet Theatre (most probably in a re-release, as I was not yet three years old when it first came out), and I had no trouble seeing the screen from one of the rows about midway back under the soffit (the underside of the balcony).
By 1950, I think, most theatre operators were routinely installing the largest screens they could fit into the space available. In older theatres, I would imagine that the size of the screen was constrained as much by the height at which the fixed draperies of the proscenium began as it was by the width of the proscenium. The largest movie palace in Los Angeles, the Paramount Downtown (aka Grauman’s Metropolitan) had a fairly wide proscenium, but its screen was probably no wider than that of many theatres with narrower prosceniums, due to the limited height available.
The suburban neighborhood houses I most frequently attended usually had screens not too much narrower than their proscenium (in the older theatres with stages), or, at widest, about half the width of the auditorium (in theatres without stages.) That means screens of about 20-30 feet wide in theatres of from 400-1200 seats. My memory of the Hillstreet is that the screen was about the size of those in the largest of the suburban theatres I attended.
There were no theatres operating on Spring Street in the 1960s. I believe that the last Spring Street theatre showing movies was the Lyceum, which closed in 1941. I don’t recall any theatre called the Edison operating anywhere in the Los Angeles area during the 1960s. I’ve never seen “Madigan” but I’ll check it out if it shows up on TV and see if I can solve the mystery.
In the L.A. library’s California Index, I found three cards citing articles in Southwest Builder & Contractor which probably concern this theatre. The issue dates are 3/28/30, 4/25/30, and 5/23/30. The theatre was being built for Fox West Coast and its subsidiary, Valley Theatres. A Mr. Dave Croft is mentioned as being connected with the project. The only location given for the theatre is “…between Heber and Hefferman streets….” The 300 block of 2nd Street is between Heber and Heffernan Avenues, so the Capitol must be the place. The architect is not named on any of the cards, but might be in at least one of the articles, if somebody can get hold of the magazine itself.
There’s another card in the index which cites a February 5, 1932, issue of Southwest Builder & Contractor in which there’s a notice about Fox West Coast Theatres planning to “…remodel the former Rialto Theatre building in Calexico. Several stores will be added.” No location is given for this house, and the wording leaves it unclear if Fox was converting an old theatre to stores, or if stores were being added to the building and the theatre was remaining but getting a name change.
These days, if a movie has a “sneak” it’s usually part of it’s publicity package, but in the 1920s sneak previews were genuinely sneaky (unannounced), and intended as a way to audience-test a movie before its release, so last-minute changes could be made. The Tower opened on October 12th, after The Jazz Singer had already been playing for several days in New York (it opened there on October 6th), and by that time the main reason for having a sneak preview would have passed.
In any case, if the preview did happen, it would have been before the Los Angeles opening of the movie at the Criterion on December 28th, so, assuming the event got mentioned in the press, there’d be about ten or eleven weeks of newspapers to sift through to find the evidence. But I suspect that the story of a Jazz Singer preview at the Tower is most likely apocryphal.
William C. Pennell was also the architect of the Strand Theatre, built in 1921 at Vernon and Broadway. Though the L.A. library’s California Index contains multiple references to Pennell having been the partner of prolific theatre architect L.A. Smith during 1920, I can find no confirmation that they ever collaborated on any completed theatre project. They were hired to design a large theatre on 6th Street in San Pedro, but that project apparently remained unbuilt.
Earlier in his career, Pennell had been in partnership with another, even more famous, Los Angeles architect, John C. Austin. During the early 1910s they collaborated on numerous projects, including several churches and a few schools with auditoriums. Their partnership had ended by 1917, when Pennell was mentioned in the press as having opened a new office. Austin went on to participate in the design of numerous Los Angeles landmarks, including City Hall, the Griffith Planetarium, and Shrine Auditorium. Pennell remains so little known that almost all the references to him in the California Index are in citations of his partners, Smith or Austin.
To correct my comment immediately above, the architects name is spelled Pennell. The only other theatre of his design that I know of is the Fairfax. Though Pennell is cited multiple times in the California Index as the partner of prolific theatre architect L.A. Smith during the year 1920, I can’t confirm that there were any built theatres on which they collaborated. They were hired to design a large theatre on 6th Street in San Pedro in 1920, but this project seems to have remained unbuilt. I’ve never found any reference indicating that Smith had anything to do with the design of the Strand, built in 1921. the Pennell-Smith partnership was apparently brief.
The City Planning Department’s information for the parcel on which the Strand was located is a bit vague. The assessor’s report includes the address 4401-4413 S. Broadway and 316-336 W. Vernon, and claims there are five buildings on the property, but it gives the date of construction (1921) and size (29,017 sq.ft.) of only one of them. The 2004 urban areas view photo at TerraServer shows five distinct rooftops arranged in an “L” shape along the two streets. There’s no indication which of the buildings is the one surviving from 1921, but odds are that it was part of Pennell’s original design.
The 1921 news report I cited in the comment above did say that the project was to be built on the corner of Vernon and Moneta (Broadway.) The arrangement of the buildings currently on the property suggest that the theatre’s auditorium probably stood inside the “L”, where a parking lot is now located. I can’t tell from the satellite view whether or not the former theatre entrance was in the part of the building surviving from 1921.
It turns out that the other movie touted in the theatre’s poster case with “Sally” (in this photo), “Clancy at the Bat”, also dates from 1929. Apparently “You-Are_Here” got the theatre’s opening date right, and Cinema Treasures has it wrong. But Metzger and his partners must have been among the pioneers of double features if they were running them in 1929.
This house opened sometime around 1920 as the New Lincoln Theatre. According to the “Walking Tour” brochure I picked up at the Downtown Pleasanton website, it was built about 1920 in the Mission Revival style. The brochure says that it became the Roxy in the 1940s, but the California Index has other information.
Issues of Motion Picture Herald from July 25 and August 22 of 1936 reveal that at that time the theatre was sold by Charles Chicazola to James B. Lima, and Lima then changed the name to Roxy (though Cal Index spells it “Roxie”.) The Downtown Pleasanton brochure gives the current address of the building as 641 Main.
The brochure also mentions two other theatres which once existed in downtown Pleasanton, both of which occupied buildings that are still standing:
1) 511 Main Street, built 1910, opened as the Gem Theatre and later became the Lincoln Theatre. No word on what happened at this site after the New Lincoln Theatre opened ca.1920.
2) A mission revival building at 720-722 Main was built as an auto showroom and garage ca.1920, but in 1945 was converted into the Rancho Theatre, “a Spanish movie house.”
This twin is apparently open again, but the name has been changed to Key Cinemas.
Here’s their website. Their phone numbers & email address are on the “Contact Us” page.
Here’s somebody’s Flickr photo of it from 2006.
California Index says that the Dixon Theatre got mentioned in the Better Theatres Section of Motion Picture Herald, May 1, 1937. A remodeling perhaps? Anyway, the Google Maps satellite view shows the address as being in the middle of a block of buildings in Dixon’s old downtown, so I’d say closed, not demolished.
A demolition permit for the Tinseltown Westchase 25 was issued by the City of Houston in January of 2008. The theatre has now been demolished.
Though the theatre itself advertises its location as Anaheim Hills, Anaheim Hills is not a separate city but a section of the City of Anaheim, and the location of this theatre will not map correctly on Google Maps unless you change the name from Anaheim Hills to Anaheim.
The chain which opened this multiplex was Sanborn Theatres, operating as SoCal Cinemas. The theatre continues to present special movie events that are provided under the name The Movie Experience by Sanborn Theatres. However, the company which provided the seats for the recent reconstruction into a stadium-seating configuration says on a popup from this page that Cinema City is operated by Starlight Cinemas, and a sidebar includes an encomium from Daniel Akarakian, President of Akarakian Theatres, indicating that he runs the place. Confusion.
Cinemapolis opened with two of its ten auditoriums equipped for 70mm presentations. Since the renovation, it has advertised all-digital projection, so I’m guessing the 70mm equipment is gone. The original seating capacity of the largest theatre in the complex was 500, but the reconfiguration for stadium seating has probably reduced that.
This complex was designed by the same architect who was responsible for all the theatres Syufy/Century built from 1964 on, Vincent G. Raney.
The date given for this photo is April 26, 1964, which is undoubtedly wrong. Not only was the the Center long gone by then, but “The Voice of Firestone” aired on NBC only from September, 1949 until June, 1954.
Another from the Library of American Broadcasting shows the Center’s big stage when the house was billed as “America’s only ice theatre.
This photo must date to about 1950, as the marquee announces the imminent arival of NBC television productions in the theatre.
Photo of a crowd waiting to enter the Midway Theatre, January 24, 1932.
Here’s the official website of the Aurora Fox.
It says (among other things) that the theatre was designed by Denver architect Charles Strong; was operated by the Fox Intermountain Amusement Company; was opened on October 30, 1946; closed as movie theatre following a fire on November 18, 1981; was renovated for use as an arts center in 1984. It also says that the original auditorium was, like its replacement, a quonset structure.
Quite a few quonset-style theatres were built in the late 1940s. I know of three that were built in the San Gabriel Valley area est of Los Angeles alone: Clarence J. Smale’s Colorado Theatrein Pasadena, and S. Charles Lee’s Star Theatre in La Puente and Garmar Theatre in Montebello. Cinema Treasures currently lists 47 theatres as being in quonsets (the Aurora Fox is not yet on the list, by the way), and is probably missing about as many.
This scan of a 1950s ad from the Ed Dobbins collection at CinemaTour also shows the address of the Grand as having been 511 S. Conkling Street. I notice that Cinema Treasures currently has it as 508 S, so that needs changing. Put the Grand back on the correct side of the street, guys!
As the photos show a building not on a corner, an address of 400 would be very unlikely. Also, the old ad on Kilduffs page shows the address as 511 S. Conkling. Baltimore County Public Library’s page must be the one that got it wrong. It’s nice to know that L.A.’s public library isn’t the only one that attaches the wrong information to its photos.
According to this page about the Seattle Cinerama Theatre on the City of Seattle website, the original design of the theatre was by local architect Raymond H. Peck. The renovation was handled by the Portland-based firm BOORA Architects.
What’s going up across the street from the new ImagineAsian Center is the Los Angeles Police Department’s motor pool building. It will essentially be just a big garage, but the LAPD grudgingly consented to allowing some retail space on the ground floor along Main Street. The project will contribute few actual users to the street, but plenty of motor traffic. It’s just the latest blob to ooze from the civic center into what used to be downtown, and will probably prove to be one of the more destructive.
It’s probably not a drawing, either, technically speaking, but a scan of a photo of a rendering. I think we should all agree to blame CinemaTour for the confusion.
From the photo of this theatre at CinemaTour, it looks to be 1930s moderne in design. That, and the fact that Shafter has never been a very large town and has thus probably never had multiple theatres built during a given decade, makes it likely that the item from Southwest Builder & Contractor issue of March 5, 1937, cited on this card at the California Index refers to the State.
The card does say the theatre was being built for a Mr. Panero, and that it would be 50'x150', which would just about accommodate the seating capacity of 550 cited above. My guess is that the State is the theatre designed by the Bakersfield firm of Franklin & Kump in 1937. Viewing the theatre’s address on TerraServer (1994 aerial photo) or on Google Maps' satellite view (a more recent picture) it looks as though they both put their markers off a bit, by about half a block. I think the State must be the building adjacent to the alley in the next block northwest of the markers.
To find the width of a screen of given height you multiply the aspect ratio by the height. Thus, 30'(1.33)=39.9'. A proper Academy ratio screen would have been 30'(1.37)=41.1'.
I was still eight years old when the first CinemaScope movie (The Robe) was released in the U.S. in September, 1953, so I saw many movies on Academy ratio theatre screens. A few of these were in big theatres in Downtown Los Angeles, but my memories of those theatres in their pre-CinemaScope days are dim. I do recall seeing High Barbaree at the 2890 seat RKO Hillstreet Theatre (most probably in a re-release, as I was not yet three years old when it first came out), and I had no trouble seeing the screen from one of the rows about midway back under the soffit (the underside of the balcony).
By 1950, I think, most theatre operators were routinely installing the largest screens they could fit into the space available. In older theatres, I would imagine that the size of the screen was constrained as much by the height at which the fixed draperies of the proscenium began as it was by the width of the proscenium. The largest movie palace in Los Angeles, the Paramount Downtown (aka Grauman’s Metropolitan) had a fairly wide proscenium, but its screen was probably no wider than that of many theatres with narrower prosceniums, due to the limited height available.
The suburban neighborhood houses I most frequently attended usually had screens not too much narrower than their proscenium (in the older theatres with stages), or, at widest, about half the width of the auditorium (in theatres without stages.) That means screens of about 20-30 feet wide in theatres of from 400-1200 seats. My memory of the Hillstreet is that the screen was about the size of those in the largest of the suburban theatres I attended.
According to Picture Show Man, it was 1932 when the Academy established the ratio of 1.37:1 as the standard for movies.
1.33:1 (just about 4:3) is the aspect ratio that was adopted by the early television industry.
Rory: If a 1.33:1 ratio screen were 30 feet high, it would be 39.9 feet wide, not 33 feet wide.
There were no theatres operating on Spring Street in the 1960s. I believe that the last Spring Street theatre showing movies was the Lyceum, which closed in 1941. I don’t recall any theatre called the Edison operating anywhere in the Los Angeles area during the 1960s. I’ve never seen “Madigan” but I’ll check it out if it shows up on TV and see if I can solve the mystery.
In the L.A. library’s California Index, I found three cards citing articles in Southwest Builder & Contractor which probably concern this theatre. The issue dates are 3/28/30, 4/25/30, and 5/23/30. The theatre was being built for Fox West Coast and its subsidiary, Valley Theatres. A Mr. Dave Croft is mentioned as being connected with the project. The only location given for the theatre is “…between Heber and Hefferman streets….” The 300 block of 2nd Street is between Heber and Heffernan Avenues, so the Capitol must be the place. The architect is not named on any of the cards, but might be in at least one of the articles, if somebody can get hold of the magazine itself.
There’s another card in the index which cites a February 5, 1932, issue of Southwest Builder & Contractor in which there’s a notice about Fox West Coast Theatres planning to “…remodel the former Rialto Theatre building in Calexico. Several stores will be added.” No location is given for this house, and the wording leaves it unclear if Fox was converting an old theatre to stores, or if stores were being added to the building and the theatre was remaining but getting a name change.
These days, if a movie has a “sneak” it’s usually part of it’s publicity package, but in the 1920s sneak previews were genuinely sneaky (unannounced), and intended as a way to audience-test a movie before its release, so last-minute changes could be made. The Tower opened on October 12th, after The Jazz Singer had already been playing for several days in New York (it opened there on October 6th), and by that time the main reason for having a sneak preview would have passed.
In any case, if the preview did happen, it would have been before the Los Angeles opening of the movie at the Criterion on December 28th, so, assuming the event got mentioned in the press, there’d be about ten or eleven weeks of newspapers to sift through to find the evidence. But I suspect that the story of a Jazz Singer preview at the Tower is most likely apocryphal.
William C. Pennell was also the architect of the Strand Theatre, built in 1921 at Vernon and Broadway. Though the L.A. library’s California Index contains multiple references to Pennell having been the partner of prolific theatre architect L.A. Smith during 1920, I can find no confirmation that they ever collaborated on any completed theatre project. They were hired to design a large theatre on 6th Street in San Pedro, but that project apparently remained unbuilt.
Earlier in his career, Pennell had been in partnership with another, even more famous, Los Angeles architect, John C. Austin. During the early 1910s they collaborated on numerous projects, including several churches and a few schools with auditoriums. Their partnership had ended by 1917, when Pennell was mentioned in the press as having opened a new office. Austin went on to participate in the design of numerous Los Angeles landmarks, including City Hall, the Griffith Planetarium, and Shrine Auditorium. Pennell remains so little known that almost all the references to him in the California Index are in citations of his partners, Smith or Austin.
To correct my comment immediately above, the architects name is spelled Pennell. The only other theatre of his design that I know of is the Fairfax. Though Pennell is cited multiple times in the California Index as the partner of prolific theatre architect L.A. Smith during the year 1920, I can’t confirm that there were any built theatres on which they collaborated. They were hired to design a large theatre on 6th Street in San Pedro in 1920, but this project seems to have remained unbuilt. I’ve never found any reference indicating that Smith had anything to do with the design of the Strand, built in 1921. the Pennell-Smith partnership was apparently brief.
The City Planning Department’s information for the parcel on which the Strand was located is a bit vague. The assessor’s report includes the address 4401-4413 S. Broadway and 316-336 W. Vernon, and claims there are five buildings on the property, but it gives the date of construction (1921) and size (29,017 sq.ft.) of only one of them. The 2004 urban areas view photo at TerraServer shows five distinct rooftops arranged in an “L” shape along the two streets. There’s no indication which of the buildings is the one surviving from 1921, but odds are that it was part of Pennell’s original design.
The 1921 news report I cited in the comment above did say that the project was to be built on the corner of Vernon and Moneta (Broadway.) The arrangement of the buildings currently on the property suggest that the theatre’s auditorium probably stood inside the “L”, where a parking lot is now located. I can’t tell from the satellite view whether or not the former theatre entrance was in the part of the building surviving from 1921.
It turns out that the other movie touted in the theatre’s poster case with “Sally” (in this photo), “Clancy at the Bat”, also dates from 1929. Apparently “You-Are_Here” got the theatre’s opening date right, and Cinema Treasures has it wrong. But Metzger and his partners must have been among the pioneers of double features if they were running them in 1929.