This theatre would have been near or adjacent to the historic Dunbar Hotel, located at 4225 S. Central Avenue. In the days when the major Los Angeles hotels were segregated, the Dunbar was the place where most African-American celebrities and entertainers stayed when making appearances in the city. Central Avenue was the location of many night clubs and restaurants, as well as several movie theatres. The Dunbar Hotel building survives, having been renovated and converted to residential apartments a number of years ago.
Another interesting tidbit about the theatre: a biographical sketch of actor and singer Herb Jeffries (“The Bronze Buckaroo”) mentions that in 1938 he was one of the performers featured in an all-black radio show which originated from the Bill Robinson Theatre on Central Avenue and was broadcast over station KFOX.
TYPO in my comment above: The date of construction for the second Casino Theatre should read 1924, of course. I still haven’t found the Casino listed at Cinema Treasures under any name. I think it might not be here yet.
The architecture firm responsible for designing the 14 screens which now accompany Welton Beckett & Associates' original Cinerama Dome are Gensler Architects, a massive diversified global company with offices in 28 cities and over 2000 employees and an equal number of clients.
Are we certain that the photograph accompanying this listing is of the Santa Monica Boulevard Tivoli? I’m just trying to recall when that area was first developed. The building pictured is in a style characteristic of the late teens-early twenties, and I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t a picture of the -other- Tivoli Theatre, built in 1921, located on Central Avenue and later known as the Bill Robinson theatre. My memory of the Royal is terribly vague, but in the back of my mind I picture it having been in a one-story building, and its neighborhood having been of more recent vintage.
I find references to two theatres in Los Angeles called the Casino (from the California Index of the regional history section at the L.A. library web site.) The first was built in 1903, designed by architect Albert H. Edelman. No location is given. If it is listed at Cinema Treasures, it must be under some other name, but it may not be listed at all.
The photograph you mentioned shows an auditorium with columns supporting the balcony. This makes it very likely that the photo depicts this 1903 Casino Theater. The second Casino Theatre was built in 1944, at 43rd and Central, designed by L.A. Smith. If you have an organ installed in 1924, this is probably the Casino Theatre from which it came.
I haven’t been able to find the second Casino Theatre listed at Cinema Treasures, but I believe it may have later been known as the Bill Robinson Theatre. There is a Cinema Treasures listing for the Bill Robinson Theatre, but it is located at 42nd and Central, in a 1921 theatre (also a Smith design) which opened as the Tivoli. If you read the comment posted on that page by KenRoe on Dec. 4, 2004, and my subsequent comment of the same date, you’ll see why I think that the Casino might have become the second theatre to be named the Bill Robinson.
When I get more time, I’ll try looking through the Cinema Treasures listings for theatres in Los Angeles to find if the 43rd and Central Casino is listed under another name. (Unfortunately, it isn’t among the theatres listed as having been designed by L.A. Smith, so I can’t find it that way.)
I’m not seeing what other viewers are describing in the recent pictures of the rug store. It looks to me as though the auditorium is largely intact. The ceiling’s coved lighting is obviously still there. The display walls look as though they are built out from the original walls, meaning there is no evidence that the murals have been painted over. More likely they are concealed and protected by the false walls now used for displaying rugs.
The original stairs in the stadium section are still there. The seating risers have been partly covered by new work, probably of standard wood frame, and are undoubtedly intact under it. Essentially, the auditorium has been concealed behind the new construction rather than destroyed by it.
I can’t find the current pictures of the exterior (mentioned in a comment above) on that site, so I can’t comment on any changes there. As for the seats having been sold, it isn’t as though theatre seats last forever anyway, or as though nobody is going to manufacture new (and better) seats in the future. If they were the original seats, they were over 50 years old, and probably ought to have been replaced anyway.
And the screen being gone isn’t a disaster. Theatres do replace old screens. Same for the old projection equipment. And while the loss of the original concession stand might be lamentable, it was a fairly simple design that could be duplicated easily enough.
As far as I can see from the photos, it looks as though this building could be returned to use as a theatre, still remarkably little changed from its original appearance, for considerably less than the cost of a new theatre of similar quality.
Or you could sell it. Some bits of theatrical memorabilia can be quite valuable. If any of the letters are from people whose names would be recognized by theatre buffs today, or if the photos are of historically significant actors (especially if the photos are hand autographed), a good sized collection could be worth quite a bit. Donating it to an institution is nice, but if you do that, be sure to get an appraisal of its value so you can deduct the donation from your income tax.
If you sell it, the collection will most likely end up being donated to an institution eventually anyway, as that’s what most serious collectors of memorabilia do. For example, look at this long list of performing arts memorabilia collections now in the possession of the Library of Congress, many of them assembled by collectors over many years from disparate sources such as Ms. Devereaux’s scrapbook.
Rod: I believe the photo on this page is from the collection at the L.A. Public Library, like the photo which ken mc linked to in his comment above. If you go to the library web site and click on the “Photo Collection” link, a search for “Pasadena” will bring up a sizable number of pictures. They are from quite a few different periods, and only a few are of the section of Colorado which you are modeling, but you might find something useful there.
In case you don’t know of it, the USC Digital Archive also has quite a few old photos of Pasadena.
rduff: I remember hearing older Pasadenans tell about the effect the passing trains had on the Tower. Unfortunately, the theatre was gone by the time I became familiar with Pasadena, so I never got to experience it firsthand.
I never got to see the Academy before its original Egyptian style was covered over in the 1957 remodeling. Cinema Treasures has a page for the Academy. (In fact, you can click the “Pasadena” link in the line just above the Tower Theatre name on this page, and it will open a page with a list of all the Pasadena theatres listed on the site so far.)
The Crest in Monrovia is listed at Cinema Treasures under its original name, the Lyric Theatre.
The Jazz Singer opened on October 6th, 1927 at the Warner Theatre in New York. The Jazz Singer was only partly sound, and was not the first movie with sound, but it was the first that made a big impression on the public, even though many theatres around the country ran an entirely silent version of the film. For the next couple of years, as theatres around the country were gradually wired for sound, they frequently ran the sound version of The Jazz Singer as their first presentation.
Wiring the nation’s thousands of theatres for sound was costly. Some of the big chains faced financial crisis, and many independent theatres simply went out of business at that time and closed forever. The situation was complicated by the fact that there were two competing systems in the early years of talkies- Fox’s Movietone sound-on-film system, and Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disk. Many theatres didn’t run either Vitaphone or Movietone films exclusively and had to install equipment for both. Eventually, the sound-on-film approach won out, of course.
The rebuilding of the El Monterey for Mrs. Martin in 1928 must have left a considerable official paper trail, and such a project was undoubtedly the subject of articles in local newspapers. Also, there must have been a newspaper advertisement for the re-opening of the theatre. I don’t know the condition of San Luis Obispo’s public archives, or if any of its newspapers' morgues from the era have been preserved, but it’s possible that something survives somewhere.
There now seems to be some question as to whether or not the Elmo was in fact the El Monterey. See Pat OD’s comment of May 25, 2006, on the Obispo Theatre page.
If the Obispo was the El Monterey, then it must have been opened under its original name before 1928, the year in which the reconstruction of the El Monterey was announced.
An article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of October 27, 1928, said that a permit had been issued for the reconstruction of the El Monterey Theatre. As the permit was issued so late in the year, and the project must have been fairly extensive (it was budgeted at $20,000), the theatre must not have opened as the Obispo until some time in 1929.
See the Elmo Theatre page for an earlier discussion regarding the El Monterey name.
This web page about Chattanooga’s Theatres gives a date of 1926 for the installation of the air conditioning plant in the Tivoli Theatre. The orginal source for this information is not cited on the page, but the date certainly fits well with the Historic American Buildings Survey’s claim that the Tivloi may have been one of the first five buildings in the U.S. to have an air conditioning plant. It seems quite possible that this claim was correct and that it was the date given in the HABS report that was an error. It still might be the other way around, of course, but typos and erroneous dates are both much more common in such documents than are extravagantly false claims.
Unfortunately, I’m even farther from Los Angeles than you are. I live in rural Northern California, about 70 miles from Sacramento. I only have access to the scanned cards in the L.A. library’s California Index on their web site, some of which contain excerpts from various SwB&C articles.
The L.A. library had a set of the magazines themselves until they were destroyed in the 1986 fire. Fortunately, the University of California at Santa Barbara had a set of the magazines, which they had already begun transferring to microfiche at the time of the fire. I think that most of the UC libraries have copies of the microfiche now.
The crest is interesting, but I don’t know of any specific connection between it and Pacific States Theaters. It might have been meant simply as decoration, and perhaps was copied from an actual historic coat of arms. I’m not too familiar with heraldry myself, but there are some web sites about it, such as Heraldry on the Internet, and you might find some information there to help you decipher the meanings of the various symbols on the Miramar’s crest.
I’ve found only a couple of references to Pacific States Theaters on-line. A few scanned cards at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index mention a company called Warner Brothers Pacific States Theatres, in connection with the Warner Brothers Theater in Sacramento and the Forum Theater in Los Angeles, and there is one card which mentions Pacific States Theatres (no mention of Warner Bros. in this instance) as the owners of the La Mar Theater in Manhattan Beach. All these mentions are from the 1930’s, and all cite issues of the trade publication Southwest Builder & Contractor.
Mark Campbell: The current proscenium of the Tower is not where the CinemaScope screen was located. The wide screen was placed several feet in front of the old screen’s location, and surrounded with drapes that closed off the stage end of the theater. This was done in the early 1950’s. The 1965 renovation didn’t involve any major structural changes to the auditorium, though some canvas murals that had been in the ceiling dome were removed and the wall murals were covered over.
Raad: While there’s a lot of information on-line about S. Charles Lee, information about L.A. Smith and Clifford Balch is still rare. I’ve actually never heard anything about a connection between Lee and Smith before, but there’s so little information available about Smith that I’m unable to either confirm or deny that such a connection existed.
As for the photograph, the image posting feature at Cinema Treasures hasn’t been available for a couple of years. I don’t know when they’ll get it fixed. In the meantime, the best way to share a picture is to post it on another web site, such as Webshots or Photobucket (both offer limited free image hosting) and then post a link to the picture here.
Raadg: I’m wondering about the source of your information on the relationship between L.A. Smith and S. Charles Lee. Lee was born in 1899, studied in Chicago, worked there in the offices of Rapp & Rapp, and only arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, just a couple of years before the much older Lewis Smith died. I can imagine the relationship the other way around, but it’s difficult to picture an established architect being mentored by a kid in his twenties.
This page at the web site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has an article from 2002 which features a picture showing the water damage in the auditorium of the Capitol Theatre.
A minor point (and not relevant to the theatre discussion), but if Tim Lucas is still around, someone might let him know that he was paying six bits), not three bits, for his movie tickets. A quarter was two bits, and thus the once-common phrase “two-bit grind house” arose to describe theatres showing triple features all day and night for a quarter.
This theatre would have been near or adjacent to the historic Dunbar Hotel, located at 4225 S. Central Avenue. In the days when the major Los Angeles hotels were segregated, the Dunbar was the place where most African-American celebrities and entertainers stayed when making appearances in the city. Central Avenue was the location of many night clubs and restaurants, as well as several movie theatres. The Dunbar Hotel building survives, having been renovated and converted to residential apartments a number of years ago.
Another interesting tidbit about the theatre: a biographical sketch of actor and singer Herb Jeffries (“The Bronze Buckaroo”) mentions that in 1938 he was one of the performers featured in an all-black radio show which originated from the Bill Robinson Theatre on Central Avenue and was broadcast over station KFOX.
TYPO in my comment above: The date of construction for the second Casino Theatre should read 1924, of course. I still haven’t found the Casino listed at Cinema Treasures under any name. I think it might not be here yet.
The architecture firm responsible for designing the 14 screens which now accompany Welton Beckett & Associates' original Cinerama Dome are Gensler Architects, a massive diversified global company with offices in 28 cities and over 2000 employees and an equal number of clients.
Are we certain that the photograph accompanying this listing is of the Santa Monica Boulevard Tivoli? I’m just trying to recall when that area was first developed. The building pictured is in a style characteristic of the late teens-early twenties, and I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t a picture of the -other- Tivoli Theatre, built in 1921, located on Central Avenue and later known as the Bill Robinson theatre. My memory of the Royal is terribly vague, but in the back of my mind I picture it having been in a one-story building, and its neighborhood having been of more recent vintage.
This is quite a puzzler.
I find references to two theatres in Los Angeles called the Casino (from the California Index of the regional history section at the L.A. library web site.) The first was built in 1903, designed by architect Albert H. Edelman. No location is given. If it is listed at Cinema Treasures, it must be under some other name, but it may not be listed at all.
The photograph you mentioned shows an auditorium with columns supporting the balcony. This makes it very likely that the photo depicts this 1903 Casino Theater. The second Casino Theatre was built in 1944, at 43rd and Central, designed by L.A. Smith. If you have an organ installed in 1924, this is probably the Casino Theatre from which it came.
I haven’t been able to find the second Casino Theatre listed at Cinema Treasures, but I believe it may have later been known as the Bill Robinson Theatre. There is a Cinema Treasures listing for the Bill Robinson Theatre, but it is located at 42nd and Central, in a 1921 theatre (also a Smith design) which opened as the Tivoli. If you read the comment posted on that page by KenRoe on Dec. 4, 2004, and my subsequent comment of the same date, you’ll see why I think that the Casino might have become the second theatre to be named the Bill Robinson.
When I get more time, I’ll try looking through the Cinema Treasures listings for theatres in Los Angeles to find if the 43rd and Central Casino is listed under another name. (Unfortunately, it isn’t among the theatres listed as having been designed by L.A. Smith, so I can’t find it that way.)
I’m not seeing what other viewers are describing in the recent pictures of the rug store. It looks to me as though the auditorium is largely intact. The ceiling’s coved lighting is obviously still there. The display walls look as though they are built out from the original walls, meaning there is no evidence that the murals have been painted over. More likely they are concealed and protected by the false walls now used for displaying rugs.
The original stairs in the stadium section are still there. The seating risers have been partly covered by new work, probably of standard wood frame, and are undoubtedly intact under it. Essentially, the auditorium has been concealed behind the new construction rather than destroyed by it.
I can’t find the current pictures of the exterior (mentioned in a comment above) on that site, so I can’t comment on any changes there. As for the seats having been sold, it isn’t as though theatre seats last forever anyway, or as though nobody is going to manufacture new (and better) seats in the future. If they were the original seats, they were over 50 years old, and probably ought to have been replaced anyway.
And the screen being gone isn’t a disaster. Theatres do replace old screens. Same for the old projection equipment. And while the loss of the original concession stand might be lamentable, it was a fairly simple design that could be duplicated easily enough.
As far as I can see from the photos, it looks as though this building could be returned to use as a theatre, still remarkably little changed from its original appearance, for considerably less than the cost of a new theatre of similar quality.
Or you could sell it. Some bits of theatrical memorabilia can be quite valuable. If any of the letters are from people whose names would be recognized by theatre buffs today, or if the photos are of historically significant actors (especially if the photos are hand autographed), a good sized collection could be worth quite a bit. Donating it to an institution is nice, but if you do that, be sure to get an appraisal of its value so you can deduct the donation from your income tax.
If you sell it, the collection will most likely end up being donated to an institution eventually anyway, as that’s what most serious collectors of memorabilia do. For example, look at this long list of performing arts memorabilia collections now in the possession of the Library of Congress, many of them assembled by collectors over many years from disparate sources such as Ms. Devereaux’s scrapbook.
Rod: I believe the photo on this page is from the collection at the L.A. Public Library, like the photo which ken mc linked to in his comment above. If you go to the library web site and click on the “Photo Collection” link, a search for “Pasadena” will bring up a sizable number of pictures. They are from quite a few different periods, and only a few are of the section of Colorado which you are modeling, but you might find something useful there.
In case you don’t know of it, the USC Digital Archive also has quite a few old photos of Pasadena.
A 1931 photograph of the Fox Colorado Theatre, from the L.A. Public Library collection.
rduff: I remember hearing older Pasadenans tell about the effect the passing trains had on the Tower. Unfortunately, the theatre was gone by the time I became familiar with Pasadena, so I never got to experience it firsthand.
I never got to see the Academy before its original Egyptian style was covered over in the 1957 remodeling. Cinema Treasures has a page for the Academy. (In fact, you can click the “Pasadena” link in the line just above the Tower Theatre name on this page, and it will open a page with a list of all the Pasadena theatres listed on the site so far.)
The Crest in Monrovia is listed at Cinema Treasures under its original name, the Lyric Theatre.
Pat OD:
The Jazz Singer opened on October 6th, 1927 at the Warner Theatre in New York. The Jazz Singer was only partly sound, and was not the first movie with sound, but it was the first that made a big impression on the public, even though many theatres around the country ran an entirely silent version of the film. For the next couple of years, as theatres around the country were gradually wired for sound, they frequently ran the sound version of The Jazz Singer as their first presentation.
Wiring the nation’s thousands of theatres for sound was costly. Some of the big chains faced financial crisis, and many independent theatres simply went out of business at that time and closed forever. The situation was complicated by the fact that there were two competing systems in the early years of talkies- Fox’s Movietone sound-on-film system, and Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disk. Many theatres didn’t run either Vitaphone or Movietone films exclusively and had to install equipment for both. Eventually, the sound-on-film approach won out, of course.
The rebuilding of the El Monterey for Mrs. Martin in 1928 must have left a considerable official paper trail, and such a project was undoubtedly the subject of articles in local newspapers. Also, there must have been a newspaper advertisement for the re-opening of the theatre. I don’t know the condition of San Luis Obispo’s public archives, or if any of its newspapers' morgues from the era have been preserved, but it’s possible that something survives somewhere.
There now seems to be some question as to whether or not the Elmo was in fact the El Monterey. See Pat OD’s comment of May 25, 2006, on the Obispo Theatre page.
Pat OD:
If the Obispo was the El Monterey, then it must have been opened under its original name before 1928, the year in which the reconstruction of the El Monterey was announced.
An article in Southwest Builder & Contractor of October 27, 1928, said that a permit had been issued for the reconstruction of the El Monterey Theatre. As the permit was issued so late in the year, and the project must have been fairly extensive (it was budgeted at $20,000), the theatre must not have opened as the Obispo until some time in 1929.
See the Elmo Theatre page for an earlier discussion regarding the El Monterey name.
This web page about Chattanooga’s Theatres gives a date of 1926 for the installation of the air conditioning plant in the Tivoli Theatre. The orginal source for this information is not cited on the page, but the date certainly fits well with the Historic American Buildings Survey’s claim that the Tivloi may have been one of the first five buildings in the U.S. to have an air conditioning plant. It seems quite possible that this claim was correct and that it was the date given in the HABS report that was an error. It still might be the other way around, of course, but typos and erroneous dates are both much more common in such documents than are extravagantly false claims.
Raad,
Unfortunately, I’m even farther from Los Angeles than you are. I live in rural Northern California, about 70 miles from Sacramento. I only have access to the scanned cards in the L.A. library’s California Index on their web site, some of which contain excerpts from various SwB&C articles.
The L.A. library had a set of the magazines themselves until they were destroyed in the 1986 fire. Fortunately, the University of California at Santa Barbara had a set of the magazines, which they had already begun transferring to microfiche at the time of the fire. I think that most of the UC libraries have copies of the microfiche now.
Radd,
The crest is interesting, but I don’t know of any specific connection between it and Pacific States Theaters. It might have been meant simply as decoration, and perhaps was copied from an actual historic coat of arms. I’m not too familiar with heraldry myself, but there are some web sites about it, such as Heraldry on the Internet, and you might find some information there to help you decipher the meanings of the various symbols on the Miramar’s crest.
I’ve found only a couple of references to Pacific States Theaters on-line. A few scanned cards at the L.A. Public Library’s California Index mention a company called Warner Brothers Pacific States Theatres, in connection with the Warner Brothers Theater in Sacramento and the Forum Theater in Los Angeles, and there is one card which mentions Pacific States Theatres (no mention of Warner Bros. in this instance) as the owners of the La Mar Theater in Manhattan Beach. All these mentions are from the 1930’s, and all cite issues of the trade publication Southwest Builder & Contractor.
Plans for construction of the Starland Theatre were announced in the Los Angeles Times issue of September 22, 1912.
The demolition of the theatre was announced in the July 25, 1968 issue of the Lincoln Heights Bulletin-News.
Mark Campbell: The current proscenium of the Tower is not where the CinemaScope screen was located. The wide screen was placed several feet in front of the old screen’s location, and surrounded with drapes that closed off the stage end of the theater. This was done in the early 1950’s. The 1965 renovation didn’t involve any major structural changes to the auditorium, though some canvas murals that had been in the ceiling dome were removed and the wall murals were covered over.
Raad: While there’s a lot of information on-line about S. Charles Lee, information about L.A. Smith and Clifford Balch is still rare. I’ve actually never heard anything about a connection between Lee and Smith before, but there’s so little information available about Smith that I’m unable to either confirm or deny that such a connection existed.
As for the photograph, the image posting feature at Cinema Treasures hasn’t been available for a couple of years. I don’t know when they’ll get it fixed. In the meantime, the best way to share a picture is to post it on another web site, such as Webshots or Photobucket (both offer limited free image hosting) and then post a link to the picture here.
Raadg: I’m wondering about the source of your information on the relationship between L.A. Smith and S. Charles Lee. Lee was born in 1899, studied in Chicago, worked there in the offices of Rapp & Rapp, and only arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, just a couple of years before the much older Lewis Smith died. I can imagine the relationship the other way around, but it’s difficult to picture an established architect being mentored by a kid in his twenties.
The architect of the Bellevue was Henry Carl Messerschmidt, who also designed the Lee Theater, now called the Grace Street Theater.
The Henrico Theatre last showed a movie in 1996, according to this 2002 article about the attempted renovation of the theatre.
The Henrico Theatre was designed by Richmond architect Edward Sinnott Sr.
The original architect of the 1912 Moolah Temple was Ernest Helfensteller.
Plans for the restoration were by Trivers & Associates, and interior design was by Kevin Kerwin, AIA, of HKW Architects, and by Checkmate Design.
This page at the web site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has an article from 2002 which features a picture showing the water damage in the auditorium of the Capitol Theatre.
A minor point (and not relevant to the theatre discussion), but if Tim Lucas is still around, someone might let him know that he was paying six bits), not three bits, for his movie tickets. A quarter was two bits, and thus the once-common phrase “two-bit grind house” arose to describe theatres showing triple features all day and night for a quarter.