This is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
The most recent version of Showcase Cinemas Revere is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
To see Beacon’s description of the project on their website, click on “portfolio”, then “commercial”, then “Showcase and Multiplex Cinemas”, and click through the various projects until you reach the page for this one.
Total seating for this multiplex is listed by the architects as 4530.
The 2003 rebuilding of the Showcase Cinemas in West Springfield was one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates. I haven’t been able to discover the architect of the original buildings.
To see Beacon’s description of the project on their website, click on “portfolio”, then “commercial”, then “Showcase and Multiplex Cinemas”, and click through the various projects until you reach the page for this one.
This is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
Thomas Tally’s off-and-on relationship with the Kinema/Criterion must have had a long run. I find numerous references in the California Index to a situation in 1935 in which it appears that Tally lost control of the theatre then regained it. However, in 1929 the house was clearly under Fox management, as on February 7 of that year The Times reported that its name would be changed to Fox Criterion (this was the period when William Fox put together the chain he would control for only a few years.) If Tally had hold of the place in 1919, then he must have lost it at least twice, altogether.
There were movie theatres on Broadway before Thomas Tally opened Tally’s Broadway Theatre at 833 S. Broadway in December, 1909. In fact, his own Tally’s New Broadway had already been operating at 554 S. Broadway for several years (the confusing name “New Broadway” might have been chosen to differentiate the house from earlier Tally theatres on other streets; I can’t find any evidence that Tally had had any earlier theatre on Broadway.)
The L.A. public library claims that this photo, depicts the interior Tally’s at 833 S. Broadway. That room looks too small to contain the nearly 900 seats the theatre was supposed to have had, though. I think it might be a picture of the narrower 554 S. Broadway Tally’s (the library’s photo database contains numerous errors, unfortunately.) In any case, most of the interior shots I’ve seen of L.A. theatres from that period look much the same as this photo, showing coffered ceilings and a bit of restrained classical detailing, so even if this photo isn’t of the second Broadway, that theatre probably did look a lot like it, or like the Hyman, or Woodley’s Optic.
The later Broadway’s facade was also rather plain in comparison to that of the Kinema (I’ve been unable to find an interior shot of the Kinema, but according to the contemporary descriptions the inside had the same French Renaissance style as the outside.) Also, even at 1700 seats, the Kinema would have had nearly twice the capacity of Tally’s Broadway.
The one other theatre I know of that might lay claim to the title of first purpose-built movie palace in Los Angeles is Quinn’s Supurba, the ca.1914 theatre on Broadway (the building was eventually demolished to make way for the Roxie). I’ve been unable to find out much about the Supurba, but the photos of it show an ornate facade, and the Roxie, on the same footprint, had some 1600 seats, so the Supurba might well have been both fancy enough and large enough to qualify as a palace, though not on the scale of the Mark brothers 1914 Mark Strand Theatre in New York, the approximately 2500 seat house usually considered the first movie palace in the U.S.
The Strand, however, had a stage large enough for vaudeville (the Supurba may have had one as well), so the Marks were clearly hedging their bets. The Kinema had only a vestigial stage, seven feet deep (see KenRoe’s comment on December 14, 2004 above). I don’t know if there were any other theatres of the Kinema’s size built in that era that had no provision for the staged “prologues” which had, by 1917, become a standard part of movie presentations in the country’s movie palaces.
Pre-opening publicity gave a seating capacity of 2500 for the Kinema. The Times article on the occasion of the grand opening probably used that number because the paper had used it in earlier articles about the project. Owners often exaggerated the size of their proposed theatres. There are later articles that gave lower seating capacities for the Kinema/Criterion. One 1928 article in Exhibitor’s Herald gave the seating capacity as 1680. In fact the house was probably always in the 1700-1800 range.
Lost Memory’s link above apparently supersedes the link I put up on February 19, 2006. Although the old link still works, LM’s new link contains all the same information, plus more, and larger versions of the old link’s photos to boot.
Also, the new link presents what is purported to be photographic evidence of a ghost at a urinal. How cool is that?!
With regard to screen captures, I’ve usually used print screen (sometimes from a full screen, if the size of the image requires it), and then saved the file to my default image viewer program, which is IrfanView. I might try MWSnap myself, though, as I like the idea of being able to edit a capture prior to saving it, rather than after, as I must do in IrfanView. Thanks, BW.
The Edwards Grand Palace, like the rest of the “Commons at Calabasas” project, was the work of F+A Architects, and the lead designer for the project was David W. Williams. The Commons at Calabasas opened in November, 1998 (source).
At the F+A website, there is a claim that theatre’s “Italian style” facade and marquee were modeled after the opera house in Florence, Italy (which I believeis called the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), but I’m unable to find an exterior photo of that venerable edifice and thus am unable to determine what degree of success the architects' efforts may have had. Whatever the case, the F+A site provides a dandy (color!) photo of the facade of the Edwards, which can be found in the site’s “Projects” section, under “Commons at Calabasas”.
Ken: I’d guess that this photo is from ca.1939-1940. The women’s outfits closely resemble Rosalind Russell’s in “His Girl Friday”, and I see the rear end of a car at far right that looks like it might be a ‘39 Chevy coupe (incidentally, John’s Old Car and Truck Pictures is a handy place to look when you’re trying to determine the dates of old photos that happen to have cars in them.)
I wonder if we’re ever going to find a photo of the Town showing what it looked like in the early years after its 1920 opening? In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if the austere modern facade with its vertical dividers might not actually have been the original design, and Albert Martin was just ahead of his time? After all, only a few years later, in 1926, he was the architectural engineer for L.A. City Hall, a strikingly modern building for that year.
Flickr user Indignico provides this photo showing the old Granada. Other pictures of the set, all depicting Reno during a 1950s flood, have cars in them, and the newest cars I can spot look to be about 1949-50 models, so I’m guessing this particular flood was the one in 1950 (the Truckee River used to inundate downtown Reno every few years.) This has the be the pre-fire Granada Theatre. Still haven’t found a picture of the 1954 Granada.
Tally’s Broadway may have been the last theatre Thomas Tally ever built, but it wasn’t the last theatre he owned or operated. The Times retrospective of his career was premature. As late as 1941, Tally was advertising for sale Tally’s Theatre (formerly known as the Kinema and the Criterion) on Grand Avenue, which he had apparently operated since at least 1933 (see ken mc’s comments of May 9 and July 7, 2007, on the Criterion page.) I don’t know who, if anybody, bought the place from him, but it was knocked down later that year.
The details on the outside of the Golden Gate look more Renaissance-Baroque than anything else to me. The interior is similar to the original interior of Lansburgh’s Hillstreet Theatre in Los Angeles, which had an predominantly Gothic style in both its auditorium and other areas, until it got a remodel in the late 1940s.
But Lansburgh did put these Gothic elements into a highly classicized framework, which made the auditoriums look almost like Renaissance designs with Gothic detailing. The Golden Gate’s auditorium seems to me to have a strong Venetian Gothic influence, though, while the Hillstreet has overall more eccentric features that are hard to pin down as any particular sort of Gothic. I think Albert may have been on the pipe when he designed the Hillstreet.
It’s often difficult to classify movie theatres according to standard styles as they are usually defined by architecture critics, because so many palace architects mixed together various elements of various styles from different periods or different cultures, and sometimes added novel and unprecedented stylistic flourishes of their own invention. Plus it’s not uncommon for the interior style of a theatre and the exterior style of its building to differ, even when they were designed by the same architect.
Because of their eclecticism, and their frequently fantastical stylistic elements, I don’t think we’ll ever get a truly precise nomenclature for describing movie theatre architecture. Way too many theatres were sui generis.
This theatre was opened by Joseph Corwin, founder of the Metropolitan Theatres circuit. Metropolitan’s page says that Joseph Corwin opened the Broadway, his first theatre in Los Angeles, in 1923. Thus it was always operated by Metropolitan, and was never Tally’s New Broadway.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only “New Broadway” theatre that ever existed on Broadway was Tally’s New Broadway Theatre at Broadway near 6th, which is the one listed at Cinema Treasures as the Garnett Theatre. That the Garnett was called Tally’s New Broadway is undeniable from the photographic evidence.
We haven’t pinned down the opening year for the Garnett/Tally’s New Broadway yet. From this photograph at the USC Archives we can see that the theatre pre-dated the Story Building on the SE corner of 6th and Broadway, on which construction began in 1908.
This theatre definitely predates the oldest surviving theatre on Broadway, the Cameo, which opened in 1910 as Clune’s Broadway. As far as Tally’s being the first movie theatre built on Broadway, it’s quite possible, though it’s also possible that a storefront nickelodeon or two opened earlier.
The large version of the ca.1909 photo of the theatre linked by kenmc on Oct. 6 2006 has moved. It’s here now. Noting the decoration along the top of the structure, it appears that Tally’s and Silverwood’s shared the same building. Silverwood’s at first occupied only a corner spot, and eventually expanded to occupy the entire building (ca.1913). By the 1920s they were in the multi-story building which remains on that site today.
From the Oakland Library, via the Online Archive of California, here is College Avenue in 1930, the Uptown Theatre in the distance (photo is highly zoom-able, so you can get a decent, though oblique, look at the front.)
The assessor’s information for this address is reported as part of a bundle, with the addresses 1232, 1234, 1236 and 1238 W. 7th. Street included. On a parcel of 11,717 sq. ft., there are said to be four buildings, but information for only one building is included on the assessor’s report, and that one is a structure of 8697 sq. ft., built in 1913.
The Playhouse is among the movie theatres listed in a 1914 ad reproduced on this L.A. Times blog page. A TerraServer satellite view of the location shows a building that looks as though it might have been a theatre. If somebody could check this one out, I think they might find that the Playhouse hasn’t been demolished after all.
Here is a 1959 photo of MacDonald Avenue at night, with the Fox Theatre (formerly the Costa) on the left. The U.A.’s marquee would have been in the foreground on the right, but this picture was apparently taken when the theatre was being remodeled into a Woolworth store. The building is covered in scaffolding, the vertical sign is gone, and the marquee looks to have been rounded off for Woolworth’s use.
During WWII, when Richmond’s population boomed due to the development of the Kaiser shipyards, photographer Dorothea Lange took hundreds of photos of the city. A large selection of these pictures are now available in digital form from the Online Archive of California. While most of the photos were related to the shipyards and their workers, a number depicted McDonald Avenue and, among those, a few of the street’s movie houses appeared.
So far I haven’t seen any photos of the Costa/Fox in the collection, but there are few pictures of the earlier T&D/Fox Theatre down the street, before it became the United Artists, and its neighboring theatre, called the Studio during the war but later renamed the Crest (I can’t find the Studio/Crest listed at Cinema Treasures.) There are also a couple of close views of the State Theatre.
This ca.1943 photo by Dorothea Lange depicts the State Theatre. The picture is one of a large number of photos taken in Richmond by Lange during WWII, afew of which depict the city’s theatres.
During WWII, photographer Dorothea Lange took numerous photographs of Richmond, most of them related to the Kaiser shipyards and their workers, but including quite a few that depicted scenes on McDonald Avenue. Today they are available in digital form as part of the Lange collection displayed online here by the Online Archives of California.
A very few of the photos depict the street’s theatres, including this one, showing the U.A. in 1942, when it was still the Fox, and also showing its next door neighbor, the Studio Theatre. Some time later the Studio was renamed the Crest, and its sign is visible just past the U.A. in the second of the two photos to which Lost Memory linked in the comment just above this one. I don’t think the Studio/Crest is listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
From the UCLA collection of L.A. Times and Daily News photos, here’s the Globe with the name “Newsreel” on its marquee. The occasion was an April, 1948 demonstration by Costa Rican emigres against their government at home. Down the block, the future Newsreel
Theatre (and former and future Tower Theatre) can be seen with the name “Music Hall” on its vertical sign.
This is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
The most recent version of Showcase Cinemas Revere is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
To see Beacon’s description of the project on their website, click on “portfolio”, then “commercial”, then “Showcase and Multiplex Cinemas”, and click through the various projects until you reach the page for this one.
Total seating for this multiplex is listed by the architects as 4530.
The 2003 rebuilding of the Showcase Cinemas in West Springfield was one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates. I haven’t been able to discover the architect of the original buildings.
To see Beacon’s description of the project on their website, click on “portfolio”, then “commercial”, then “Showcase and Multiplex Cinemas”, and click through the various projects until you reach the page for this one.
This is one of more than 70 cinema projects which have been designed for National Amusements by the Boston-based architectural firm Beacon Architectural Associates.
Thomas Tally’s off-and-on relationship with the Kinema/Criterion must have had a long run. I find numerous references in the California Index to a situation in 1935 in which it appears that Tally lost control of the theatre then regained it. However, in 1929 the house was clearly under Fox management, as on February 7 of that year The Times reported that its name would be changed to Fox Criterion (this was the period when William Fox put together the chain he would control for only a few years.) If Tally had hold of the place in 1919, then he must have lost it at least twice, altogether.
There were movie theatres on Broadway before Thomas Tally opened Tally’s Broadway Theatre at 833 S. Broadway in December, 1909. In fact, his own Tally’s New Broadway had already been operating at 554 S. Broadway for several years (the confusing name “New Broadway” might have been chosen to differentiate the house from earlier Tally theatres on other streets; I can’t find any evidence that Tally had had any earlier theatre on Broadway.)
The L.A. public library claims that this photo, depicts the interior Tally’s at 833 S. Broadway. That room looks too small to contain the nearly 900 seats the theatre was supposed to have had, though. I think it might be a picture of the narrower 554 S. Broadway Tally’s (the library’s photo database contains numerous errors, unfortunately.) In any case, most of the interior shots I’ve seen of L.A. theatres from that period look much the same as this photo, showing coffered ceilings and a bit of restrained classical detailing, so even if this photo isn’t of the second Broadway, that theatre probably did look a lot like it, or like the Hyman, or Woodley’s Optic.
The later Broadway’s facade was also rather plain in comparison to that of the Kinema (I’ve been unable to find an interior shot of the Kinema, but according to the contemporary descriptions the inside had the same French Renaissance style as the outside.) Also, even at 1700 seats, the Kinema would have had nearly twice the capacity of Tally’s Broadway.
The one other theatre I know of that might lay claim to the title of first purpose-built movie palace in Los Angeles is Quinn’s Supurba, the ca.1914 theatre on Broadway (the building was eventually demolished to make way for the Roxie). I’ve been unable to find out much about the Supurba, but the photos of it show an ornate facade, and the Roxie, on the same footprint, had some 1600 seats, so the Supurba might well have been both fancy enough and large enough to qualify as a palace, though not on the scale of the Mark brothers 1914 Mark Strand Theatre in New York, the approximately 2500 seat house usually considered the first movie palace in the U.S.
The Strand, however, had a stage large enough for vaudeville (the Supurba may have had one as well), so the Marks were clearly hedging their bets. The Kinema had only a vestigial stage, seven feet deep (see KenRoe’s comment on December 14, 2004 above). I don’t know if there were any other theatres of the Kinema’s size built in that era that had no provision for the staged “prologues” which had, by 1917, become a standard part of movie presentations in the country’s movie palaces.
Pre-opening publicity gave a seating capacity of 2500 for the Kinema. The Times article on the occasion of the grand opening probably used that number because the paper had used it in earlier articles about the project. Owners often exaggerated the size of their proposed theatres. There are later articles that gave lower seating capacities for the Kinema/Criterion. One 1928 article in Exhibitor’s Herald gave the seating capacity as 1680. In fact the house was probably always in the 1700-1800 range.
“Arrowsmith” with Ronald Coleman and Helen Hayes was released in the U.S. on December 26, 1931. ;p
The town name, Mojave, is mispelled twice at the top of this page. It should be Mojave in all three instances.
Lost Memory’s link above apparently supersedes the link I put up on February 19, 2006. Although the old link still works, LM’s new link contains all the same information, plus more, and larger versions of the old link’s photos to boot.
Also, the new link presents what is purported to be photographic evidence of a ghost at a urinal. How cool is that?!
With regard to screen captures, I’ve usually used print screen (sometimes from a full screen, if the size of the image requires it), and then saved the file to my default image viewer program, which is IrfanView. I might try MWSnap myself, though, as I like the idea of being able to edit a capture prior to saving it, rather than after, as I must do in IrfanView. Thanks, BW.
The Edwards Grand Palace, like the rest of the “Commons at Calabasas” project, was the work of F+A Architects, and the lead designer for the project was David W. Williams. The Commons at Calabasas opened in November, 1998 (source).
At the F+A website, there is a claim that theatre’s “Italian style” facade and marquee were modeled after the opera house in Florence, Italy (which I believeis called the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino), but I’m unable to find an exterior photo of that venerable edifice and thus am unable to determine what degree of success the architects' efforts may have had. Whatever the case, the F+A site provides a dandy (color!) photo of the facade of the Edwards, which can be found in the site’s “Projects” section, under “Commons at Calabasas”.
Ken: I’d guess that this photo is from ca.1939-1940. The women’s outfits closely resemble Rosalind Russell’s in “His Girl Friday”, and I see the rear end of a car at far right that looks like it might be a ‘39 Chevy coupe (incidentally, John’s Old Car and Truck Pictures is a handy place to look when you’re trying to determine the dates of old photos that happen to have cars in them.)
I wonder if we’re ever going to find a photo of the Town showing what it looked like in the early years after its 1920 opening? In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if the austere modern facade with its vertical dividers might not actually have been the original design, and Albert Martin was just ahead of his time? After all, only a few years later, in 1926, he was the architectural engineer for L.A. City Hall, a strikingly modern building for that year.
Flickr user Indignico provides this photo showing the old Granada. Other pictures of the set, all depicting Reno during a 1950s flood, have cars in them, and the newest cars I can spot look to be about 1949-50 models, so I’m guessing this particular flood was the one in 1950 (the Truckee River used to inundate downtown Reno every few years.) This has the be the pre-fire Granada Theatre. Still haven’t found a picture of the 1954 Granada.
Tally’s Broadway may have been the last theatre Thomas Tally ever built, but it wasn’t the last theatre he owned or operated. The Times retrospective of his career was premature. As late as 1941, Tally was advertising for sale Tally’s Theatre (formerly known as the Kinema and the Criterion) on Grand Avenue, which he had apparently operated since at least 1933 (see ken mc’s comments of May 9 and July 7, 2007, on the Criterion page.) I don’t know who, if anybody, bought the place from him, but it was knocked down later that year.
The details on the outside of the Golden Gate look more Renaissance-Baroque than anything else to me. The interior is similar to the original interior of Lansburgh’s Hillstreet Theatre in Los Angeles, which had an predominantly Gothic style in both its auditorium and other areas, until it got a remodel in the late 1940s.
But Lansburgh did put these Gothic elements into a highly classicized framework, which made the auditoriums look almost like Renaissance designs with Gothic detailing. The Golden Gate’s auditorium seems to me to have a strong Venetian Gothic influence, though, while the Hillstreet has overall more eccentric features that are hard to pin down as any particular sort of Gothic. I think Albert may have been on the pipe when he designed the Hillstreet.
It’s often difficult to classify movie theatres according to standard styles as they are usually defined by architecture critics, because so many palace architects mixed together various elements of various styles from different periods or different cultures, and sometimes added novel and unprecedented stylistic flourishes of their own invention. Plus it’s not uncommon for the interior style of a theatre and the exterior style of its building to differ, even when they were designed by the same architect.
Because of their eclecticism, and their frequently fantastical stylistic elements, I don’t think we’ll ever get a truly precise nomenclature for describing movie theatre architecture. Way too many theatres were sui generis.
This theatre was opened by Joseph Corwin, founder of the Metropolitan Theatres circuit. Metropolitan’s page says that Joseph Corwin opened the Broadway, his first theatre in Los Angeles, in 1923. Thus it was always operated by Metropolitan, and was never Tally’s New Broadway.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the only “New Broadway” theatre that ever existed on Broadway was Tally’s New Broadway Theatre at Broadway near 6th, which is the one listed at Cinema Treasures as the Garnett Theatre. That the Garnett was called Tally’s New Broadway is undeniable from the photographic evidence.
We haven’t pinned down the opening year for the Garnett/Tally’s New Broadway yet. From this photograph at the USC Archives we can see that the theatre pre-dated the Story Building on the SE corner of 6th and Broadway, on which construction began in 1908.
This theatre definitely predates the oldest surviving theatre on Broadway, the Cameo, which opened in 1910 as Clune’s Broadway. As far as Tally’s being the first movie theatre built on Broadway, it’s quite possible, though it’s also possible that a storefront nickelodeon or two opened earlier.
The large version of the ca.1909 photo of the theatre linked by kenmc on Oct. 6 2006 has moved. It’s here now. Noting the decoration along the top of the structure, it appears that Tally’s and Silverwood’s shared the same building. Silverwood’s at first occupied only a corner spot, and eventually expanded to occupy the entire building (ca.1913). By the 1920s they were in the multi-story building which remains on that site today.
From the Oakland Library, via the Online Archive of California, here is College Avenue in 1930, the Uptown Theatre in the distance (photo is highly zoom-able, so you can get a decent, though oblique, look at the front.)
The assessor’s information for this address is reported as part of a bundle, with the addresses 1232, 1234, 1236 and 1238 W. 7th. Street included. On a parcel of 11,717 sq. ft., there are said to be four buildings, but information for only one building is included on the assessor’s report, and that one is a structure of 8697 sq. ft., built in 1913.
The Playhouse is among the movie theatres listed in a 1914 ad reproduced on this L.A. Times blog page. A TerraServer satellite view of the location shows a building that looks as though it might have been a theatre. If somebody could check this one out, I think they might find that the Playhouse hasn’t been demolished after all.
Here is a 1959 photo of MacDonald Avenue at night, with the Fox Theatre (formerly the Costa) on the left. The U.A.’s marquee would have been in the foreground on the right, but this picture was apparently taken when the theatre was being remodeled into a Woolworth store. The building is covered in scaffolding, the vertical sign is gone, and the marquee looks to have been rounded off for Woolworth’s use.
During WWII, when Richmond’s population boomed due to the development of the Kaiser shipyards, photographer Dorothea Lange took hundreds of photos of the city. A large selection of these pictures are now available in digital form from the Online Archive of California. While most of the photos were related to the shipyards and their workers, a number depicted McDonald Avenue and, among those, a few of the street’s movie houses appeared.
So far I haven’t seen any photos of the Costa/Fox in the collection, but there are few pictures of the earlier T&D/Fox Theatre down the street, before it became the United Artists, and its neighboring theatre, called the Studio during the war but later renamed the Crest (I can’t find the Studio/Crest listed at Cinema Treasures.) There are also a couple of close views of the State Theatre.
This ca.1943 photo by Dorothea Lange depicts the State Theatre. The picture is one of a large number of photos taken in Richmond by Lange during WWII, afew of which depict the city’s theatres.
During WWII, photographer Dorothea Lange took numerous photographs of Richmond, most of them related to the Kaiser shipyards and their workers, but including quite a few that depicted scenes on McDonald Avenue. Today they are available in digital form as part of the Lange collection displayed online here by the Online Archives of California.
A very few of the photos depict the street’s theatres, including this one, showing the U.A. in 1942, when it was still the Fox, and also showing its next door neighbor, the Studio Theatre. Some time later the Studio was renamed the Crest, and its sign is visible just past the U.A. in the second of the two photos to which Lost Memory linked in the comment just above this one. I don’t think the Studio/Crest is listed at Cinema Treasures yet.
From the UCLA collection of L.A. Times and Daily News photos, here’s the Globe with the name “Newsreel” on its marquee. The occasion was an April, 1948 demonstration by Costa Rican emigres against their government at home. Down the block, the future Newsreel
Theatre (and former and future Tower Theatre) can be seen with the name “Music Hall” on its vertical sign.