Here’s a slightly wider version of the photo at the top of this page. The Paradise was built in 1950, a few years before the various wide-screen processes of the era were developed, so its exceptional width was not intended to accommodate them (unless architect Ted Rogvoy was presciently anticipating their development.) The building was a splendid example of Midcentury Modern design, and maybe the best theatre in that style in the Los Angeles area.
The Kim Sing Theatre has been converted to a living space/furniture showroom by a designer who now owns it. It was featured in one episode of the HGTV show What’s With That House? I remember seeing the Kim Sing before it was called the Kim Sing, back when Chinatown had not yet expanded as far west as Figueroa Street. It was running Mexican movies at the time, and I believe it was using the name Alpine Theatre (it was on Figueroa at the corner of Alpine Street.)
As the first Godzilla movie came out in 1954, and I recall the La Brea still being a Fox house at that time (it was across the street from my doctor’s office), I suspect that the Japanese language version of the movie would have first been shown at the Linda Lea, either in 1954 or 1955. It would probably have been run with English subtitles, as most of the movies shown there were. After Toho acquired the La Brea (in the late 1950s, I think), that theatre ran many of the company’s “arty” films, leaving the more popular stuff for the Linda Lea or to a Japanese language theatre (can’t remember the name) that opened up in the West Adams area. I think there might have been a Japanese movie theatre in Gardena in those days, too.
The plans for the Strand Theatre were announced in Southwest Builder & Contractor issue of March 18, 1921. The location given was the corner of Moneta (now Broadway) and Vernon. The owner was named as Ed Colter, the architect as William C. Penell. The building was described as a two story brick theatre, store and market. It was listed as the Strand Theatre, at 4409 S. Moneta Avenue, in the 1923 City Directory.
The theatre’s peripatetic front door suggests that Penell may have studied architecture at Hogwarts Academy, but this is only speculation.
The Junior Orpheum Circuit ran combination houses which featured moderately-priced shows consisting of a movie and several acts of vaudeville, presented either continuously or (usually) three times a day. Regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show-a-day, all-vaudeville houses, though of course many of them soon converted to combination houses or ran only movies as vaudeville withered away.
Guys: The Mozart Theatre at 730 S. Grand was the one with all the names (Including, per the photo, Clune’s Grand Avenue Theatre.) It outlasted the Criterion. Also, the state library got both direction and date wrong on its photo. The view is south from 7th and Grand, not north, and the year has to be 1908 or later, when the building was erected.
As for the Fox Criterion, it looks as though (per ken mc’s comment of May 29 this year) that this theatre’s last operating name must have been either Tally’s Theatre or Grand Wilshire Theatre, since the original entry at top of this page says that it was razed in 1941.
Michael Coate:
I find a four-plex theatre named the Coronet listed in the United Artists Theatres section of the movie listings in the L.A. Times Calendar section for August 24, 1986. Its location is given as Westwood Boulevard one block south of Wilshire. It isn’t listed in the Times' movie listings in the issue of February 10, 1971, but that issue does contain a listing for a theatre called the U.A. Westwood, with no street name given. The same place perhaps? I can’t find hide nor hair of either theatre listed at Cinema Treasures. You must be right about it being missing from the site.
There’s a small photo of a U.A. Westwood Theatre on this page at Roadside Peek, but again the exact location is not given. The photo appears to be more recent than either of the moive lisings I’ve cited.
Two articles that are more recent than the one from August of 2006 linked above (though not very recent) about the Park Theatre (January 24, 2007 and January 31, 2007) are a bit more hopeful about the building’s future. A dance studio is not a theatre, of course, but such a use would at least make it possible to largely preserve the theatre’s interior layout and any surviving decoration in its auditorium. I’ve been unable to find any more recent information about Andy Duncan’s proposal. Maybe somebody from the area knows more.
The California Club occupied the building at 5th and Hill from 1904 until 1930. I think construction of the Title Guarantee building began in 1930 and it was completed in 1931.
The library has this .pdf of a brochure on Art Deco Los Angeles published by the L.A. Conservancy. It gives the dates of development for the Title Guaranty building as 1929-1931.
Ken: that picture is much later than 1920. I don’t think that Walker & Eisen’s National Bank of Commerce Building was completed until 1928. It replaced the old Masonic Temple, which was demolished early in 1925. The site was then used as a temporary location for P.E.’s Hill Street Station while the Subway Terminal was being built. After the terminal opened, the Bank of Commerce Building was built.
Yes, the College Theatre was adjacent to the California Club building. The building with the Coca-Cola ad (“Relieves Fatigue”!) was the old Masonic Temple. That’s where the Bank of Commerce Building was built a few years after this picture was taken.
The Auditorium is at the far right of this panorama of downtown taken from a rooftop on Olive Street south of Fourth, and dated 1923 by the L.A. library. It’s remarkable how big this theatre was.
By scrolling to the left end of the panorama you can also see the back and side walls of the Million Dollar Theatre at Third and Broadway. At center right of the panorama is a view of the Pacific Electric’s Hill Street Station, which was discussed in comments above.
Ken, I wonder if the boxy building at left foreground in that 1917 photo, across the street and down a bit from Tally’s, was the Woodley/Victory/Mission which was demolished to make way for the fourth Orpheum?
Those aerial photos clear up my puzzling childhood memory of the Fox Figueroa. I knew there was something unusual about the building’s configuration, and now I see that it was that the auditorium was set at an angle to the street. I have no idea how my memory transformed that angularity into an open corner plaza, though.
If the address of 649 was not a typo, then my guess would be that the Republic moved up the block to new quarters when that big office building on the northwest corner of 7th and Main was built. 649 S. Main would have been very near the corner of 7th Street.
The Melrose Hotel, from which the photo was taken, was on the east side of Grand Avenue north of Second Street, so, yes, the view is east with Olive Street in the foreground. That’s undoubtedly this Grand Theatre in the distance. It’s possible to see from this photo that the name is painted on the wall of the auditorium, not on the fly tower (as it appears it might be in this photo from the 1920s, by which time the name had been changed to Teatro Mexico.) That means that the Grand must have extended through the block most of the way to Los Angeles Street, just like the Hippodrome and the Burbank.
Ken, USC’s caption writer missed the most theatrically interesting feature of that photo. The big, dark building at center left is the side wall of the Mason Opera House, the auditorium on the left and the much taller stage house on the right, each with its own roof gable. I think that the white double door near the upper left corner of the building might have been the entrance to the segregated second balcony, which was entered from Hill Street rather than Broadway.
The problem is not with the definition of the word “theatre”, but with the use of the word “Building.” Edison’s Vitascope Theater in Buffalo, also known as Edisonia Hall, was built in the basement of the Ellicott Square Building building (an immense office and commercial block containing 500,000 square feet, completed in 1896), and was apparently the first commercial use of that basement, but the theatre was not part of the building’s original plans. That’s why all those reliable books don’t consider it the first building built especially to show movies. In fact there were many movie theatres— probably dozens— opened between 1896 and 1902 in spaces tucked into existing buildings, but Tally’s Electric Theatre on Main Street remains the first permanent building in the world known to have been built from the ground up with the intention of using it to house a movie theatre.
The Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo is significant, not only for being one of the first successful movie theatres in the world (it continued in operation for more than a year), but for being the first movie theatre operated by Mitchell Mark who, with his brother Moe, eventually operated dozens of theatres, including their flagship house, the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York.
Another interesting fact about Buffalo’s Vitascope Theatre is that, Like Thomas Tally’s Spring Street operation of 1896, it was paired with a phonograph parlor. Wikipedia displays an old advertisement for it. However, the buildings which housed Tally’s theatres, both the 1896 Spring Street operation at the back of his phonograph parlor and the 1902 Main Street operation in its purpose-built building, have been demolished, while Buffalo’s Ellicott Square Building still exists, so it’s still possible to get a good look at the storefront which housed Mark’s phonograph parlor, and (if the building’s owners will allow it) the basement space which housed his Vitascope Theatre.
So far, neither the Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo nor Vitascope Hall in New Orleans has been listed at Cinema Treasures.
The Rivoli was at 6258 Van Nuys Boulevard. It was open by 1921. In that year, a Bessie Harrison Prothero won a naming contest for the theatre, according to an article in the Van Nuys News of June 23, 1921. I don’t know if the theatre was brand new, or was an older theatre being renamed.
In 1935, the Rivoli suffered some $5,000 of damage from a fire, reported in the Van Nuys News of November 30. The theatre survived, and in 1939 both it and the nearby Van Nuys Theatre hosted premiers, the first ever held in the San Fernando Valley, according to a September 13 article in Daily Variety.
On May 30, 1941, Southwest Builder & Contractor announced that there would be a new facade and rest rooms at the Rivoli Theatre in Van Nuys, to be designed by architect Clifford Balch.
By 1960 the Rivoli had been renamed the Capri Theatre. It was still listed under that name in the National General Theatres section of the L.A. Times theatre guide on February 10, 1971.
I thought the shop in the theatre was selling Esther Williams brand swim wear, as displayed by that rather disturbing collection of mannequin torsos suspended from the underside of the marquee.
I don’t remember the Flick ever being anything but a storefront porn house. However, there were at least two small storefront theatres operating in Hollywood during the 1960s that were not porn houses. I remember seeing a revival of the 1930s era film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a small storefront theatre on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard, somewhere west of Western Avenue, I think. This place had regular theatre seats, with the back rows on built-up risers, and a decent width screen (as good as the early AMC shoe boxes), and I think it may have become a porn house later.
Then there was another storefront conversion on the west side of a side street just north of Hollywood Boulevard. I’m not positive but I think it might have been Normandie. This was in a high-ceilinged shop which had a mezzanine above the front entrance and show windows, and I think it was either a coffee house or an art gallery (or maybe a bit of both) at the time of its conversion into a movie theatre. The projection room was installed on the mezzanine (I think it must have been 16mm) and the screen about two thirds of the way to the back of the room. The place had small tables and bentwood chairs like a typical coffee house of the era, and a couple of old couches. I only went there once and don’t remember any of the indie movie shorts that made up the program that night.
Southwest Builder & Contractor announced in its issue of July 10, 1925, that architects A. Godfrey Bailey and Carl Boller were completing the plans for the Broadway Theatre. The same publication announced the letting of the contracts for construction in their issue of July 31. The building was owned by F.E. Farnsworth and the theatre was leased to E.D. Yost.
Here’s a slightly wider version of the photo at the top of this page. The Paradise was built in 1950, a few years before the various wide-screen processes of the era were developed, so its exceptional width was not intended to accommodate them (unless architect Ted Rogvoy was presciently anticipating their development.) The building was a splendid example of Midcentury Modern design, and maybe the best theatre in that style in the Los Angeles area.
The Kim Sing Theatre has been converted to a living space/furniture showroom by a designer who now owns it. It was featured in one episode of the HGTV show What’s With That House? I remember seeing the Kim Sing before it was called the Kim Sing, back when Chinatown had not yet expanded as far west as Figueroa Street. It was running Mexican movies at the time, and I believe it was using the name Alpine Theatre (it was on Figueroa at the corner of Alpine Street.)
As the first Godzilla movie came out in 1954, and I recall the La Brea still being a Fox house at that time (it was across the street from my doctor’s office), I suspect that the Japanese language version of the movie would have first been shown at the Linda Lea, either in 1954 or 1955. It would probably have been run with English subtitles, as most of the movies shown there were. After Toho acquired the La Brea (in the late 1950s, I think), that theatre ran many of the company’s “arty” films, leaving the more popular stuff for the Linda Lea or to a Japanese language theatre (can’t remember the name) that opened up in the West Adams area. I think there might have been a Japanese movie theatre in Gardena in those days, too.
The plans for the Strand Theatre were announced in Southwest Builder & Contractor issue of March 18, 1921. The location given was the corner of Moneta (now Broadway) and Vernon. The owner was named as Ed Colter, the architect as William C. Penell. The building was described as a two story brick theatre, store and market. It was listed as the Strand Theatre, at 4409 S. Moneta Avenue, in the 1923 City Directory.
The theatre’s peripatetic front door suggests that Penell may have studied architecture at Hogwarts Academy, but this is only speculation.
The Junior Orpheum Circuit ran combination houses which featured moderately-priced shows consisting of a movie and several acts of vaudeville, presented either continuously or (usually) three times a day. Regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show-a-day, all-vaudeville houses, though of course many of them soon converted to combination houses or ran only movies as vaudeville withered away.
Guys: The Mozart Theatre at 730 S. Grand was the one with all the names (Including, per the photo, Clune’s Grand Avenue Theatre.) It outlasted the Criterion. Also, the state library got both direction and date wrong on its photo. The view is south from 7th and Grand, not north, and the year has to be 1908 or later, when the building was erected.
As for the Fox Criterion, it looks as though (per ken mc’s comment of May 29 this year) that this theatre’s last operating name must have been either Tally’s Theatre or Grand Wilshire Theatre, since the original entry at top of this page says that it was razed in 1941.
Michael Coate:
I find a four-plex theatre named the Coronet listed in the United Artists Theatres section of the movie listings in the L.A. Times Calendar section for August 24, 1986. Its location is given as Westwood Boulevard one block south of Wilshire. It isn’t listed in the Times' movie listings in the issue of February 10, 1971, but that issue does contain a listing for a theatre called the U.A. Westwood, with no street name given. The same place perhaps? I can’t find hide nor hair of either theatre listed at Cinema Treasures. You must be right about it being missing from the site.
There’s a small photo of a U.A. Westwood Theatre on this page at Roadside Peek, but again the exact location is not given. The photo appears to be more recent than either of the moive lisings I’ve cited.
Two articles that are more recent than the one from August of 2006 linked above (though not very recent) about the Park Theatre (January 24, 2007 and January 31, 2007) are a bit more hopeful about the building’s future. A dance studio is not a theatre, of course, but such a use would at least make it possible to largely preserve the theatre’s interior layout and any surviving decoration in its auditorium. I’ve been unable to find any more recent information about Andy Duncan’s proposal. Maybe somebody from the area knows more.
The California Club occupied the building at 5th and Hill from 1904 until 1930. I think construction of the Title Guarantee building began in 1930 and it was completed in 1931.
The library has this .pdf of a brochure on Art Deco Los Angeles published by the L.A. Conservancy. It gives the dates of development for the Title Guaranty building as 1929-1931.
That probably is the Garrick at the end of the block, plus it looks like the Rialto had been completed, or was nearly complete.
Ken: that picture is much later than 1920. I don’t think that Walker & Eisen’s National Bank of Commerce Building was completed until 1928. It replaced the old Masonic Temple, which was demolished early in 1925. The site was then used as a temporary location for P.E.’s Hill Street Station while the Subway Terminal was being built. After the terminal opened, the Bank of Commerce Building was built.
Yes, the College Theatre was adjacent to the California Club building. The building with the Coca-Cola ad (“Relieves Fatigue”!) was the old Masonic Temple. That’s where the Bank of Commerce Building was built a few years after this picture was taken.
The Auditorium is at the far right of this panorama of downtown taken from a rooftop on Olive Street south of Fourth, and dated 1923 by the L.A. library. It’s remarkable how big this theatre was.
By scrolling to the left end of the panorama you can also see the back and side walls of the Million Dollar Theatre at Third and Broadway. At center right of the panorama is a view of the Pacific Electric’s Hill Street Station, which was discussed in comments above.
Ken, I wonder if the boxy building at left foreground in that 1917 photo, across the street and down a bit from Tally’s, was the Woodley/Victory/Mission which was demolished to make way for the fourth Orpheum?
Ken, it was the Pan Pacific Auditorium that closed in 1972. The Pan Pacific Theatre remained open until 1984.
Those aerial photos clear up my puzzling childhood memory of the Fox Figueroa. I knew there was something unusual about the building’s configuration, and now I see that it was that the auditorium was set at an angle to the street. I have no idea how my memory transformed that angularity into an open corner plaza, though.
If the address of 649 was not a typo, then my guess would be that the Republic moved up the block to new quarters when that big office building on the northwest corner of 7th and Main was built. 649 S. Main would have been very near the corner of 7th Street.
The Melrose Hotel, from which the photo was taken, was on the east side of Grand Avenue north of Second Street, so, yes, the view is east with Olive Street in the foreground. That’s undoubtedly this Grand Theatre in the distance. It’s possible to see from this photo that the name is painted on the wall of the auditorium, not on the fly tower (as it appears it might be in this photo from the 1920s, by which time the name had been changed to Teatro Mexico.) That means that the Grand must have extended through the block most of the way to Los Angeles Street, just like the Hippodrome and the Burbank.
Ken, USC’s caption writer missed the most theatrically interesting feature of that photo. The big, dark building at center left is the side wall of the Mason Opera House, the auditorium on the left and the much taller stage house on the right, each with its own roof gable. I think that the white double door near the upper left corner of the building might have been the entrance to the segregated second balcony, which was entered from Hill Street rather than Broadway.
The problem is not with the definition of the word “theatre”, but with the use of the word “Building.” Edison’s Vitascope Theater in Buffalo, also known as Edisonia Hall, was built in the basement of the Ellicott Square Building building (an immense office and commercial block containing 500,000 square feet, completed in 1896), and was apparently the first commercial use of that basement, but the theatre was not part of the building’s original plans. That’s why all those reliable books don’t consider it the first building built especially to show movies. In fact there were many movie theatres— probably dozens— opened between 1896 and 1902 in spaces tucked into existing buildings, but Tally’s Electric Theatre on Main Street remains the first permanent building in the world known to have been built from the ground up with the intention of using it to house a movie theatre.
The Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo is significant, not only for being one of the first successful movie theatres in the world (it continued in operation for more than a year), but for being the first movie theatre operated by Mitchell Mark who, with his brother Moe, eventually operated dozens of theatres, including their flagship house, the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York.
Another interesting fact about Buffalo’s Vitascope Theatre is that, Like Thomas Tally’s Spring Street operation of 1896, it was paired with a phonograph parlor. Wikipedia displays an old advertisement for it. However, the buildings which housed Tally’s theatres, both the 1896 Spring Street operation at the back of his phonograph parlor and the 1902 Main Street operation in its purpose-built building, have been demolished, while Buffalo’s Ellicott Square Building still exists, so it’s still possible to get a good look at the storefront which housed Mark’s phonograph parlor, and (if the building’s owners will allow it) the basement space which housed his Vitascope Theatre.
So far, neither the Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo nor Vitascope Hall in New Orleans has been listed at Cinema Treasures.
Ken is correct. The Capri Theater is the renamed Rivoli Theatre.
The Rivoli was at 6258 Van Nuys Boulevard. It was open by 1921. In that year, a Bessie Harrison Prothero won a naming contest for the theatre, according to an article in the Van Nuys News of June 23, 1921. I don’t know if the theatre was brand new, or was an older theatre being renamed.
In 1935, the Rivoli suffered some $5,000 of damage from a fire, reported in the Van Nuys News of November 30. The theatre survived, and in 1939 both it and the nearby Van Nuys Theatre hosted premiers, the first ever held in the San Fernando Valley, according to a September 13 article in Daily Variety.
On May 30, 1941, Southwest Builder & Contractor announced that there would be a new facade and rest rooms at the Rivoli Theatre in Van Nuys, to be designed by architect Clifford Balch.
By 1960 the Rivoli had been renamed the Capri Theatre. It was still listed under that name in the National General Theatres section of the L.A. Times theatre guide on February 10, 1971.
I thought the shop in the theatre was selling Esther Williams brand swim wear, as displayed by that rather disturbing collection of mannequin torsos suspended from the underside of the marquee.
I don’t remember the Flick ever being anything but a storefront porn house. However, there were at least two small storefront theatres operating in Hollywood during the 1960s that were not porn houses. I remember seeing a revival of the 1930s era film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a small storefront theatre on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard, somewhere west of Western Avenue, I think. This place had regular theatre seats, with the back rows on built-up risers, and a decent width screen (as good as the early AMC shoe boxes), and I think it may have become a porn house later.
Then there was another storefront conversion on the west side of a side street just north of Hollywood Boulevard. I’m not positive but I think it might have been Normandie. This was in a high-ceilinged shop which had a mezzanine above the front entrance and show windows, and I think it was either a coffee house or an art gallery (or maybe a bit of both) at the time of its conversion into a movie theatre. The projection room was installed on the mezzanine (I think it must have been 16mm) and the screen about two thirds of the way to the back of the room. The place had small tables and bentwood chairs like a typical coffee house of the era, and a couple of old couches. I only went there once and don’t remember any of the indie movie shorts that made up the program that night.
Southwest Builder & Contractor announced in its issue of July 10, 1925, that architects A. Godfrey Bailey and Carl Boller were completing the plans for the Broadway Theatre. The same publication announced the letting of the contracts for construction in their issue of July 31. The building was owned by F.E. Farnsworth and the theatre was leased to E.D. Yost.
This theatre needs an AKA as the Lyric Theatre, per Ron Pierce’s first paragraph at top.
The movie named on the marquee in the photo to which Lost Memory linked above, Oh Billy, Behave, was released in 1926.