The Rio was not on the corner, but just up the block on the west side of Western Avenue. The county assessor’s office gives the address of the parcel on which the Rio stood as 11239 S. Western Avenue, and the building now there was erected in 1995. At TerraServer you can see the 1994 aerial photo of the intersection, and the Rio was still there, so it must have been demolished in 1994 or 1995. I think it had closed earlier though.
I passed by the Rio several times in the 1950s, when we used to take my grandfather fishing in Manhattan Beach, and we usually drove down Western and turned west on Imperial. It was a nice looking modern building with the theatre’s name in enormous letters. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a photo of the Rio somewhere on the Internet but I can’t find it right now.
According to the county assessor’s office, this building was erected in 1925, but has an effective year built of 1927. A different effective year built usually indicates some major addition or alteration, but in this case the two dates are so close together it makes me wonder what happened.
As I now know that this theatre backs up to 3rd Street, I’m thinking that perhaps this was, after all, the theatre proposed in 1925 which I mentioned in the first paragraph of my comment of December 8, 2004, above. The bulk of the Avenue does occupy a lot fronting on 3rd Street, and only a narrow structure containing the lobby connects it to Downey Avenue.
There are at lest two vanished South Gate theatres missing from Cinema Treasures though. There were houses called the Gem and the Avon, which probably existed during the silent era. They may have been knocked down by the 1933 earthquake, as many buildings in that area were.
According to the county assessor, the building at Long Beach and Glenwood was built in 1941, with an effective build date of 1946. I wonder if it could have been the Trianon Ballroom, a popular night spot of the 1940s and the site of several live remote broadcasts of a music show called One Night Stand produced by the Armed Forces Radio Service during WWII?
The building also looks like it could have been a bowling alley. Bowling became a fad in the 1930s-1940s, and L.A. used to be littered with streamline moderne bowling alleys.
Nick and Edna Stewart opened the first Ebony Theatre in 1950, in a former garage at Washington and Western. After a couple of moves, the highly successful and well-respected theater company moved into the Metro Theatre in 1965. The names Ebony Theatre and Ebony Showcase Theatre were used to describe both the venues and the theater company which occupied them.
In the 1990s the Community Renewal Agency of Los Angeles seized the Ebony Theatre’s buildings by eminent domain. Despite assurances from the agency and from Nate Holden, then the city councilman for the area, that the theatre would be saved, the buildings were demolished in September of 1998. Today the site is occupied by a multi-million dollar arts and theatre complex owned by the CRA and named for Holden.
Three small photos of the theatre in its later years can be seen on this web page at the site maintained by Nick and Edna Stewart’s daughter, Valerie Stewart. Other pages on the site tell the story of the Ebony Showcase, and of its sad fate at the hands of the city’s urban renewal agency.
Cinema Treasures has actually been moving in the opposite direction, eliminating various neighborhood names such as Westwood and Westchester. In any case, the way the site is set up, Los Angeles and East Los Angeles are already lumped together by the search function.
Yes, now that the Rancho de Cucamonga has been entirely subdivided and developed, they’ve changed the name of the town from Cucamonga to Rancho Cucamonga. Sort of like a killer taking on the identity of his victim.
East Los Angeles is the official name of an unincorporated community. If the place ever incorporates, it would probably keep the name. Casually, the name East Los Angeles or East L.A. is also used to describe the whole region on the east side of Los Angeles, including a lot of neighborhoods within the city such as Lincoln Heights (which actually was officially called East Los Angeles when it was first developed back in the 1870s) and Boyle Heights. Officially, though, it’s just that unicorporated area between Los Angeles and Monterey Park.
The building is definitely still standing. According to the L.A. County Assessor’s report, the building was built in 1922, and comprises 15,765 sq. ft. on three lots, at 6001, 6009, and 6013 S. Broadway.
The update should show a status of closed, the function as retail, the architect as L.A. Smith. As it closed before the age of twinning it undoubtedly had only one screen, and the announcement of its construction in Southwest Builder & Contractor claimed it would have 900 seats- probably about right, judging from the size of the auditorium as revealed in the recent satellite photos. The original chain was West Coast Theatres. There should be an AKA of Circle Theatre, the name with which it opened in 1922.
The style, just to make a wild guess from Ken’s photo of it was probably Oriental, of the “Arabian Nights” variety. Check out that pair of lamps, now painted vivid red, on the corners of the facade above the former entrance.
I should note that the Tyloon.com link to Acevedo’s Upholstery in my Comment of July 20, 2007, opens a satellite view that has a marker misplaced to the east side of the street, to the former location of the Aloha Theatre. The Century was definitely in the building on the west side of Broadway.
Some of the links are dead. They are all posted by users, rather than by the site, and sometimes the users don’t keep their Photobucket (or Webshots or whatever site they’ve linked to) accounts, or they run out of space and remove older photos to make room for new ones. I do still see hollywood90038’s three photos of the Bruin linked on October 28 last year, though.
The County Assessor’s office says that the 5274 sq. ft. building at 316 W. 7th St. was built in 1910, with an effective building date of 1913. The City’s ZIMAS report for the property just says 1910. Both include the addresses 316, 318, and 320 as belonging to the same parcel. All one building. I guess the function should be listed as retail.
Maybe I should have said it was “uncompleted” in December of 2000, but I’ve never been there so I’m unaware of the state of the place. It’s one of the projects listed by TransMineral USA, the company that makes the hydraulic lime (I believe it’s similar to the material that used to be called cast stone) with which the building appears to be partly faced. Their website gives the date of completion as December, 2000.
Krikorian’s Monrovia Cinema 12 was completed in December, 2000. It was designed by Gensler & Associates. I suppose the style might be described as a post-modern eclectic mannerism, but whatever the style, I’ve come to think of it as mouskitecture, in honor (or dishonor) of Mickey. Appropriately, Gensler & Associates also designed the AMC Theatres at Downtown Disney multiplex.
The marquee and the vertical tower are gone (there’s a small picture- by Scott Neff- of the theatre on this page at CinemaTour showing the damage), but I think the building itself is probably still standing. My best guess for the address of the Tower is 340 W. Sycamore Street, and the Google Maps satellite view of that address shows a dark-roofed building there.
According to the banner displayed on the building in Scott Neff’s photo, the Tower was to have become the new location of the Bible Way Association Church, but that institution still shows an address on Plumas Street. I’m not sure what year the photo was taken, but it can’t have been too many years ago.
I’ve only ever seen the end exits on the fronts of those few older theatres that had stadium sections, such as the Rialto on Broadway and the Monterey (nee Mission) in Monterey Park. It’s possible that some theatres with ordinary balconies also had such exits from the balcony to the front of the building, but I’ve never seen one. My guess would be that the “balcony” advertised in LoopNet’s listing of Bowling Green’s State Theatre is more likely a stadium section.
This configuration is pretty rare. I’ve only ever been to three theatres with such stadium sections, and only two of those (the Rialto and Monterey) had the end exits on the front. Both of these houses had two cross aisles- one at the top of the passages leading into the theatre, and a second across the middle of the stadium section. The stairs leading down to the front end exits were accessed from the upper cross aisle.
The third theatre with a stadium section that I attended was the Whittwood in Whittier, a post-war theatre in which there was only one cross aisle, and the stairs were entirely internal, leading up from the lobby and providing the access to both the stadium section and the orchestra floor.
The Rio was not on the corner, but just up the block on the west side of Western Avenue. The county assessor’s office gives the address of the parcel on which the Rio stood as 11239 S. Western Avenue, and the building now there was erected in 1995. At TerraServer you can see the 1994 aerial photo of the intersection, and the Rio was still there, so it must have been demolished in 1994 or 1995. I think it had closed earlier though.
I passed by the Rio several times in the 1950s, when we used to take my grandfather fishing in Manhattan Beach, and we usually drove down Western and turned west on Imperial. It was a nice looking modern building with the theatre’s name in enormous letters. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a photo of the Rio somewhere on the Internet but I can’t find it right now.
According to the county assessor’s office, this building was erected in 1925, but has an effective year built of 1927. A different effective year built usually indicates some major addition or alteration, but in this case the two dates are so close together it makes me wonder what happened.
As I now know that this theatre backs up to 3rd Street, I’m thinking that perhaps this was, after all, the theatre proposed in 1925 which I mentioned in the first paragraph of my comment of December 8, 2004, above. The bulk of the Avenue does occupy a lot fronting on 3rd Street, and only a narrow structure containing the lobby connects it to Downey Avenue.
There are at lest two vanished South Gate theatres missing from Cinema Treasures though. There were houses called the Gem and the Avon, which probably existed during the silent era. They may have been knocked down by the 1933 earthquake, as many buildings in that area were.
According to the county assessor, the building at Long Beach and Glenwood was built in 1941, with an effective build date of 1946. I wonder if it could have been the Trianon Ballroom, a popular night spot of the 1940s and the site of several live remote broadcasts of a music show called One Night Stand produced by the Armed Forces Radio Service during WWII?
The building also looks like it could have been a bowling alley. Bowling became a fad in the 1930s-1940s, and L.A. used to be littered with streamline moderne bowling alleys.
Status should now be “renovating” in that case.
Nick and Edna Stewart opened the first Ebony Theatre in 1950, in a former garage at Washington and Western. After a couple of moves, the highly successful and well-respected theater company moved into the Metro Theatre in 1965. The names Ebony Theatre and Ebony Showcase Theatre were used to describe both the venues and the theater company which occupied them.
In the 1990s the Community Renewal Agency of Los Angeles seized the Ebony Theatre’s buildings by eminent domain. Despite assurances from the agency and from Nate Holden, then the city councilman for the area, that the theatre would be saved, the buildings were demolished in September of 1998. Today the site is occupied by a multi-million dollar arts and theatre complex owned by the CRA and named for Holden.
Three small photos of the theatre in its later years can be seen on this web page at the site maintained by Nick and Edna Stewart’s daughter, Valerie Stewart. Other pages on the site tell the story of the Ebony Showcase, and of its sad fate at the hands of the city’s urban renewal agency.
Cinema Treasures has actually been moving in the opposite direction, eliminating various neighborhood names such as Westwood and Westchester. In any case, the way the site is set up, Los Angeles and East Los Angeles are already lumped together by the search function.
Yes, now that the Rancho de Cucamonga has been entirely subdivided and developed, they’ve changed the name of the town from Cucamonga to Rancho Cucamonga. Sort of like a killer taking on the identity of his victim.
East Los Angeles is the official name of an unincorporated community. If the place ever incorporates, it would probably keep the name. Casually, the name East Los Angeles or East L.A. is also used to describe the whole region on the east side of Los Angeles, including a lot of neighborhoods within the city such as Lincoln Heights (which actually was officially called East Los Angeles when it was first developed back in the 1870s) and Boyle Heights. Officially, though, it’s just that unicorporated area between Los Angeles and Monterey Park.
The site of the Crystal is more than a mile west of Indiana Street, so it’s well inside the city limits of Los Angeles.
The building is definitely still standing. According to the L.A. County Assessor’s report, the building was built in 1922, and comprises 15,765 sq. ft. on three lots, at 6001, 6009, and 6013 S. Broadway.
The update should show a status of closed, the function as retail, the architect as L.A. Smith. As it closed before the age of twinning it undoubtedly had only one screen, and the announcement of its construction in Southwest Builder & Contractor claimed it would have 900 seats- probably about right, judging from the size of the auditorium as revealed in the recent satellite photos. The original chain was West Coast Theatres. There should be an AKA of Circle Theatre, the name with which it opened in 1922.
The style, just to make a wild guess from Ken’s photo of it was probably Oriental, of the “Arabian Nights” variety. Check out that pair of lamps, now painted vivid red, on the corners of the facade above the former entrance.
I should note that the Tyloon.com link to Acevedo’s Upholstery in my Comment of July 20, 2007, opens a satellite view that has a marker misplaced to the east side of the street, to the former location of the Aloha Theatre. The Century was definitely in the building on the west side of Broadway.
Some of the links are dead. They are all posted by users, rather than by the site, and sometimes the users don’t keep their Photobucket (or Webshots or whatever site they’ve linked to) accounts, or they run out of space and remove older photos to make room for new ones. I do still see hollywood90038’s three photos of the Bruin linked on October 28 last year, though.
I believe you are correct, Clarkus. It was KBCA.
The County Assessor’s office says that the 5274 sq. ft. building at 316 W. 7th St. was built in 1910, with an effective building date of 1913. The City’s ZIMAS report for the property just says 1910. Both include the addresses 316, 318, and 320 as belonging to the same parcel. All one building. I guess the function should be listed as retail.
I’m semi-local myself, living in the next county east, but I have no chances to get out of town coming up, even for a short trip.
This complex was designed by STK Architects.
This complex was designed by STK Architects
This megaplex was designed by STK Architects.
This megaplex was designed by STK Architects.
This complex was designed by STK Architects.
Maybe I should have said it was “uncompleted” in December of 2000, but I’ve never been there so I’m unaware of the state of the place. It’s one of the projects listed by TransMineral USA, the company that makes the hydraulic lime (I believe it’s similar to the material that used to be called cast stone) with which the building appears to be partly faced. Their website gives the date of completion as December, 2000.
Krikorian’s Monrovia Cinema 12 was completed in December, 2000. It was designed by Gensler & Associates. I suppose the style might be described as a post-modern eclectic mannerism, but whatever the style, I’ve come to think of it as mouskitecture, in honor (or dishonor) of Mickey. Appropriately, Gensler & Associates also designed the AMC Theatres at Downtown Disney multiplex.
The marquee and the vertical tower are gone (there’s a small picture- by Scott Neff- of the theatre on this page at CinemaTour showing the damage), but I think the building itself is probably still standing. My best guess for the address of the Tower is 340 W. Sycamore Street, and the Google Maps satellite view of that address shows a dark-roofed building there.
According to the banner displayed on the building in Scott Neff’s photo, the Tower was to have become the new location of the Bible Way Association Church, but that institution still shows an address on Plumas Street. I’m not sure what year the photo was taken, but it can’t have been too many years ago.
I’ve only ever seen the end exits on the fronts of those few older theatres that had stadium sections, such as the Rialto on Broadway and the Monterey (nee Mission) in Monterey Park. It’s possible that some theatres with ordinary balconies also had such exits from the balcony to the front of the building, but I’ve never seen one. My guess would be that the “balcony” advertised in LoopNet’s listing of Bowling Green’s State Theatre is more likely a stadium section.
This configuration is pretty rare. I’ve only ever been to three theatres with such stadium sections, and only two of those (the Rialto and Monterey) had the end exits on the front. Both of these houses had two cross aisles- one at the top of the passages leading into the theatre, and a second across the middle of the stadium section. The stairs leading down to the front end exits were accessed from the upper cross aisle.
The third theatre with a stadium section that I attended was the Whittwood in Whittier, a post-war theatre in which there was only one cross aisle, and the stairs were entirely internal, leading up from the lobby and providing the access to both the stadium section and the orchestra floor.
Ken: Did you also get photos of the Circle Theatre while you were in Bellflower?