The L.A. Times of February 10, 1971 lists the Capri Theatre at 444 S. Glendora Avenue. It was a single screen house being operated by Loew’s Theatres. The L.A. Times of August 24, 1986 lists the Capri as a triplex being operated by SoCal Cinemas.
Ken mc: The Laughlin had a wider entrance. See this correctly labeled picture: http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater1/00014862.jpg
I think the picture you linked to definitely depicts the Palace, which had a very narrow entrance. An even better reason for believing that the LAPL has erroneously named this photo as being of the Laughlin is the fact that the name “Palace” can be made out (just barely), inscribed on the floor just in front of that pair of duded up fellows posing for the camera.
The Fox Wilshire is no longer being operated by the Nederlander organization. This means they are severing their connection to the venue two years earlier than was arranged in the three year lease-back agreement they made with the owners last year, noted in this article in the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Somehow I missed the announcement of the transfer of ownership of the building from Nederlander to the Temple of the Arts synagogue at the time it happened last year.
I also don’t know what this latest development means for the future of the building or the type of events that will be presented there, but with Nederlander out of the picture it seems unlikely that there will be any more Broadway shows among those events. They will probably be going to the Pantages and the Henry Fonda Music Box in Hollywood, both of which Nederlander still operates.
Wikipedia’s article on the Fox Theatre Circuit is pretty thin. I’ve thought about expanding it myself, but haven’t had the time. In fact, all the Internet sources on this subject are pretty thin. There’s a decent thumbnail biography of William Fox on the website of the St. Louis Fox Theatre, here. He started with a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904, and through expansions and mergers with other companies built the chain into one of the world’s largest before losing control of it in the early 1930s.
Fox took over the West Coast Theatre Circuit, which became its largest division, in the 1920s. West Coast was itself the result of a series of expansions and mergers. You can find a few bits of information about it on the Internet by doing Google searches on the names “Turner and Dahnken”, and “Turner, Dahnken and Langley”, which were predecessor companies. They also operated some theatres under the name T&D, but T&D Junior was a later company they started, not part of Fox.
Most of Fox-West Coast ended up in the hands of National General Theatres in the 1960s, and then much of it became part of Mann Theatres (including Fox’s flagship and most famous theatre, Grauman’s Chinese.) Today, of course, most of the Fox empire is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, parent company of the various Fox Television operations.
I think kenmc’s broken link was to this picture, which definitely shows the Warner Hollywood, not the Warner Downtown as the picture’s info page claims. LAPL seems to get about 1%-2% of their captions wrong, which I guess is pretty good for a collection of 60,000 pictures, but you do have to watch out for their errors.
The Adams was one of four theatres with Egyptian style interiors (none had Egyptian exteriors) designed for the Bard Theatre Circuit by architect Lewis Smith in the 1920s. The Vista Theatre in East Hollywood was the smallest, and the only one of the four still largely intact.
The Garfield Theatre in Alhambra was about the same size as the Adams, having a large auditorium with no balcony. A successful suburban theatre operated for many years by the Edwards circuit, and remodeled more than once, it’s Egyptian decor was gone by the late 1950’s. The Garfield’s auditorium was demolished only a few years ago, but the commercial and apartment block in front of it remains standing.
The largest of the four was Bard’s Pasadena, still in operation but virtually unrecognizable as the Academy Theatre, a six-screen art house opened in the mid ‘80s. The Academy had retained its Egyptian style until the mid 1950s when it underwent an extensive remodeling inside and out which gave it an Art Moderne look. It continued to operate as a single-screen theatre until about 1984, by which time it was getting pretty run down.
The Bard circuit had a fifth Egyptian style theatre, Bard’s Glendale, later operated by Fox-West Coast as the Glen Theatre, but that one was designed by Pasadena architect Kenneth A. Gordon rather than Smith. The Glen closed in the 1950s and was converted into a bowling alley. The building still stands, but none of the original interior decoration remains.
If the plans of the Washington Stage Guild come to fruition, the site of the Gayety/Shubert will once again house a legitimate theatre; a 250 seat house scheduled to open in the spring of 2008.
Ironstone Vineyards, owners of the Robert Morgan pipe organ formerly in the Alhambra Theatre, built the Alhambra Music Room at their winery to house it.
Here is a 1985 photo of the Boulevard Cinema in Canoga Park from the L.A. Public Library collection. The L.A. Times Calender section of August 24, 1986, lists the Boulevard at 6937 Topanga, so this must be the place!
In the Independent Theatre Guide of the L.A. Times, February 10, 1971, this theatre was already listed as the Park Theatre and was showing adult films. It was also one of the ten houses listed in the Pussycat Theatres ad in that same issue of the Times.
The UA Granada Hills 7, then called the UA Movies, was one of four San Fernando Valley area United Artists multiplexes listed in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday, August 24, 1986. The others were the six screen UA Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, the six screen UA Warner Center in Woodland Hills, and the five screen UA Movies in Thousand Oaks. I can’t find the Thousand Oaks theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, but it was at 382 Hillcrest Drive, in The Oaks Shopping Center.
All three theatres were very close together, but I don’t think they were all open at the same time. I’m pretty sure the Hawaii closed a few years before the building the X 1&2 was in was converted into a theatre. I can’t remember what was in that building before.
shatter: The World was in the dark building at far left, beyond the parking lot you can see in the first of the three pictures hollywood90038 linked to above. If you look at the third of the three pictures, you can see a corner of the building where the Hawaii Theatre was located, just past another parking lot east of the Florentine Gardens.
Johnny V: You are mostly correct. Web references to the theatre-based Mickey Mouse Clubs of the 1930’s do usually name the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park the home of the first chapter. However, your date of 1939 is off. The date most commonly given for the inauguration of the club is January 11, 1930 (though some websites give dates as early as 1929). What is certain is that the Disney Company published a bi-monthly newsletter called “The Official Bulletin of the Mickey Mouse Club” for distribution to club members, and the first issue was dated April 30, 1930.
Looking at the January 2007 photo, I’m thinking that this could not have been the Admiral Theatre, unless the entrance had once been in the central of the three storefronts shown here rather than the narrow storefront on the right which is where the Main Theatre’s entrance was. The Admiral had a fairly wide entrance, with some decent terrazzo flooring, as I recall.
kenmc: Either the building has had two floors lopped off its top, or that is a different building than the one the Central was in. I’m inclined to think its a different building. I have a vague memory of a parking lot being on that site in the 1960s. I have another vague memory of a scene in the movie “Chinatown” when Jake is fetching his car from a parking lot and we see the Million Dollar Theatre in the background across the street.
You can see the Central’s marquee (through a haze of smoke) in the picture I linked to last October from the CT Cozy Theatre page.
ken: That’s the 400 block of Broadway in your picture, isn’t it? The Cozy was in the 300 block. It was in that building which now includes among its tenants Goleth’s Beauty Salon, depicted in the photo you just linked to from the Central Theatre page.
Here’s a 1957 photo from the L.A. Library of a theatre called the Linkletter Playhouse, from which Art Linkletter did his television show. On the picture’s full data page (the library doesn’t allow linking to those, unfortunately), the address is given as 1232 North Vine Street. It must be the Filmarte, but with a slightly altered street number.
It’s hard to tell from these fragments, but it doesn’t look as though that block had two theatres on it at the same time. My guess would be that the Hitching Post was remodeled and became the Paris sometime in late 1949 or early 1950.
Next door to the Acme was the Grand Theater, at 1117 7th Street, in operation under that name from at least 1910 until 1917. It operated as a movie and vaudeville house under other names until 1926, after which it served other uses.
This historic photograph, c1910, shows part of what is likely only a sign pointing toward the Grand down the block along 7th Street, for the edification of passersby on busy K Street.
OK, the 1930 article in Southwest Builder & Contractor actually says that the new theatre is to be built at “17th and J Streets” which means it is the new Merced Theatre that it refers to (the “1” on “17” had been blocked out on the library’s reference card for some reason.) 17th Street is now called Main Street, and J Street has been renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
The web site link listed above for this theatre no longer works, and I can’t find a new location. A recent edit to the Mainzer’s Wikipedia entry says that the building has been sold and the theatre is currently closed.
Meantime, here’s a bit of stuff about the theatre’s history I’ve dug up at the L.A. Library’s online California Index:
The Motion Picture Herald of 5/19/36 published this item:
“The Golden State Theatre and Realty Company plan to reopen the Merced Theatre at Merced… under the name of the Strand Theatre.”
An earlier article in the same publication (2/18/1928) said that the Merced Theatre was being doubled in size.
The only other probable reference to the Merced/Strand I’ve found is from Southwest Builder & Contractor of 5/1/1936 which says that Salih Bros. of San Francisco had been awarded the contract for altering the theatre building, at an estimated cost of $25,000.
However, there’s a complication to all this nomenclature. Southwest Builder & Contractor of 1/17/1930 makes reference to a Mr. Frank Alberti, “…manager of the Merced and Strand Theatres…” who was announcing plans for a new theatre for Golden State at 7th and J Streets, to be designed by Reid Brothers (presumably unbuilt.) But this indicates that the Strand name was already in use in 1930. I suppose it’s possible that Motion Picture Herald just didn’t get the message about the name change for the old Merced Theatre until the time of the renovations in 1936.
The L.A. Times of February 10, 1971 lists the Capri Theatre at 444 S. Glendora Avenue. It was a single screen house being operated by Loew’s Theatres. The L.A. Times of August 24, 1986 lists the Capri as a triplex being operated by SoCal Cinemas.
Ken mc: The Laughlin had a wider entrance. See this correctly labeled picture:
http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater1/00014862.jpg
I think the picture you linked to definitely depicts the Palace, which had a very narrow entrance. An even better reason for believing that the LAPL has erroneously named this photo as being of the Laughlin is the fact that the name “Palace” can be made out (just barely), inscribed on the floor just in front of that pair of duded up fellows posing for the camera.
I’d say that the LAPL picture is definitely this Palace Theatre, which opened in 1916. Even in later years the Palace had that very narrow entrance.
The Fox Wilshire is no longer being operated by the Nederlander organization. This means they are severing their connection to the venue two years earlier than was arranged in the three year lease-back agreement they made with the owners last year, noted in this article in the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Somehow I missed the announcement of the transfer of ownership of the building from Nederlander to the Temple of the Arts synagogue at the time it happened last year.
I also don’t know what this latest development means for the future of the building or the type of events that will be presented there, but with Nederlander out of the picture it seems unlikely that there will be any more Broadway shows among those events. They will probably be going to the Pantages and the Henry Fonda Music Box in Hollywood, both of which Nederlander still operates.
Wikipedia’s article on the Fox Theatre Circuit is pretty thin. I’ve thought about expanding it myself, but haven’t had the time. In fact, all the Internet sources on this subject are pretty thin. There’s a decent thumbnail biography of William Fox on the website of the St. Louis Fox Theatre, here. He started with a Brooklyn nickelodeon in 1904, and through expansions and mergers with other companies built the chain into one of the world’s largest before losing control of it in the early 1930s.
Fox took over the West Coast Theatre Circuit, which became its largest division, in the 1920s. West Coast was itself the result of a series of expansions and mergers. You can find a few bits of information about it on the Internet by doing Google searches on the names “Turner and Dahnken”, and “Turner, Dahnken and Langley”, which were predecessor companies. They also operated some theatres under the name T&D, but T&D Junior was a later company they started, not part of Fox.
Most of Fox-West Coast ended up in the hands of National General Theatres in the 1960s, and then much of it became part of Mann Theatres (including Fox’s flagship and most famous theatre, Grauman’s Chinese.) Today, of course, most of the Fox empire is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, parent company of the various Fox Television operations.
I think kenmc’s broken link was to this picture, which definitely shows the Warner Hollywood, not the Warner Downtown as the picture’s info page claims. LAPL seems to get about 1%-2% of their captions wrong, which I guess is pretty good for a collection of 60,000 pictures, but you do have to watch out for their errors.
The Adams was one of four theatres with Egyptian style interiors (none had Egyptian exteriors) designed for the Bard Theatre Circuit by architect Lewis Smith in the 1920s. The Vista Theatre in East Hollywood was the smallest, and the only one of the four still largely intact.
The Garfield Theatre in Alhambra was about the same size as the Adams, having a large auditorium with no balcony. A successful suburban theatre operated for many years by the Edwards circuit, and remodeled more than once, it’s Egyptian decor was gone by the late 1950’s. The Garfield’s auditorium was demolished only a few years ago, but the commercial and apartment block in front of it remains standing.
The largest of the four was Bard’s Pasadena, still in operation but virtually unrecognizable as the Academy Theatre, a six-screen art house opened in the mid ‘80s. The Academy had retained its Egyptian style until the mid 1950s when it underwent an extensive remodeling inside and out which gave it an Art Moderne look. It continued to operate as a single-screen theatre until about 1984, by which time it was getting pretty run down.
The Bard circuit had a fifth Egyptian style theatre, Bard’s Glendale, later operated by Fox-West Coast as the Glen Theatre, but that one was designed by Pasadena architect Kenneth A. Gordon rather than Smith. The Glen closed in the 1950s and was converted into a bowling alley. The building still stands, but none of the original interior decoration remains.
If the plans of the Washington Stage Guild come to fruition, the site of the Gayety/Shubert will once again house a legitimate theatre; a 250 seat house scheduled to open in the spring of 2008.
Ironstone Vineyards, owners of the Robert Morgan pipe organ formerly in the Alhambra Theatre, built the Alhambra Music Room at their winery to house it.
Here is a 1985 photo of the Boulevard Cinema in Canoga Park from the L.A. Public Library collection. The L.A. Times Calender section of August 24, 1986, lists the Boulevard at 6937 Topanga, so this must be the place!
In the Independent Theatre Guide of the L.A. Times, February 10, 1971, this theatre was already listed as the Park Theatre and was showing adult films. It was also one of the ten houses listed in the Pussycat Theatres ad in that same issue of the Times.
The UA Granada Hills 7, then called the UA Movies, was one of four San Fernando Valley area United Artists multiplexes listed in the Los Angeles Times of Sunday, August 24, 1986. The others were the six screen UA Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, the six screen UA Warner Center in Woodland Hills, and the five screen UA Movies in Thousand Oaks. I can’t find the Thousand Oaks theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, but it was at 382 Hillcrest Drive, in The Oaks Shopping Center.
All three theatres were very close together, but I don’t think they were all open at the same time. I’m pretty sure the Hawaii closed a few years before the building the X 1&2 was in was converted into a theatre. I can’t remember what was in that building before.
shatter: The World was in the dark building at far left, beyond the parking lot you can see in the first of the three pictures hollywood90038 linked to above. If you look at the third of the three pictures, you can see a corner of the building where the Hawaii Theatre was located, just past another parking lot east of the Florentine Gardens.
Johnny V: You are mostly correct. Web references to the theatre-based Mickey Mouse Clubs of the 1930’s do usually name the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park the home of the first chapter. However, your date of 1939 is off. The date most commonly given for the inauguration of the club is January 11, 1930 (though some websites give dates as early as 1929). What is certain is that the Disney Company published a bi-monthly newsletter called “The Official Bulletin of the Mickey Mouse Club” for distribution to club members, and the first issue was dated April 30, 1930.
Looking at the January 2007 photo, I’m thinking that this could not have been the Admiral Theatre, unless the entrance had once been in the central of the three storefronts shown here rather than the narrow storefront on the right which is where the Main Theatre’s entrance was. The Admiral had a fairly wide entrance, with some decent terrazzo flooring, as I recall.
kenmc: Either the building has had two floors lopped off its top, or that is a different building than the one the Central was in. I’m inclined to think its a different building. I have a vague memory of a parking lot being on that site in the 1960s. I have another vague memory of a scene in the movie “Chinatown” when Jake is fetching his car from a parking lot and we see the Million Dollar Theatre in the background across the street.
You can see the Central’s marquee (through a haze of smoke) in the picture I linked to last October from the CT Cozy Theatre page.
ken: That’s the 400 block of Broadway in your picture, isn’t it? The Cozy was in the 300 block. It was in that building which now includes among its tenants Goleth’s Beauty Salon, depicted in the photo you just linked to from the Central Theatre page.
Here’s a 1957 photo from the L.A. Library of a theatre called the Linkletter Playhouse, from which Art Linkletter did his television show. On the picture’s full data page (the library doesn’t allow linking to those, unfortunately), the address is given as 1232 North Vine Street. It must be the Filmarte, but with a slightly altered street number.
Ken: I’m thinking this must be one of those cases when a name change didn’t make it into the Film Daily Yearbook.
Here’s a 1951 picture.
Here’s another from 1951.
It’s hard to tell from these fragments, but it doesn’t look as though that block had two theatres on it at the same time. My guess would be that the Hitching Post was remodeled and became the Paris sometime in late 1949 or early 1950.
Here is an especially evocative nocturnal view of the Alhambra Theatre from the late 1920s.
Listed as a Pacific Drive-In triplex in the L.A. Times Calendar section, Sunday August 24, 1986.
Next door to the Acme was the Grand Theater, at 1117 7th Street, in operation under that name from at least 1910 until 1917. It operated as a movie and vaudeville house under other names until 1926, after which it served other uses.
This historic photograph, c1910, shows part of what is likely only a sign pointing toward the Grand down the block along 7th Street, for the edification of passersby on busy K Street.
OK, the 1930 article in Southwest Builder & Contractor actually says that the new theatre is to be built at “17th and J Streets” which means it is the new Merced Theatre that it refers to (the “1” on “17” had been blocked out on the library’s reference card for some reason.) 17th Street is now called Main Street, and J Street has been renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
The web site link listed above for this theatre no longer works, and I can’t find a new location. A recent edit to the Mainzer’s Wikipedia entry says that the building has been sold and the theatre is currently closed.
Meantime, here’s a bit of stuff about the theatre’s history I’ve dug up at the L.A. Library’s online California Index:
The Motion Picture Herald of 5/19/36 published this item:
An earlier article in the same publication (2/18/1928) said that the Merced Theatre was being doubled in size.The only other probable reference to the Merced/Strand I’ve found is from Southwest Builder & Contractor of 5/1/1936 which says that Salih Bros. of San Francisco had been awarded the contract for altering the theatre building, at an estimated cost of $25,000.
However, there’s a complication to all this nomenclature. Southwest Builder & Contractor of 1/17/1930 makes reference to a Mr. Frank Alberti, “…manager of the Merced and Strand Theatres…” who was announcing plans for a new theatre for Golden State at 7th and J Streets, to be designed by Reid Brothers (presumably unbuilt.) But this indicates that the Strand name was already in use in 1930. I suppose it’s possible that Motion Picture Herald just didn’t get the message about the name change for the old Merced Theatre until the time of the renovations in 1936.