ken mc: Are the directories in that room on open shelves? It’s possible that they keep the L.A. directories in a closed area, and available only on request, as they’d probably be the most popular, and thus the ones most likely to become damaged or lost if kept on open shelves. Also, a lot of the old reference materials in the library have been put in storage after being made available on microfilm or microfiche. The library’s web site contains a City Directories Index search page, but I haven’t figured out how to use it.
Carey: The L.A. Public Library’s on-line photo database contains at least these two pictures of the Palace, c1928, with the “Broadway Palace” name on it:
The information about the name “News Palace” (adopted in 1939) is covered in my comment of Dec. 8, 2004, near the top of this page. I’ve never seen the Daily Variety article itself; only the index card displayed in the California Index section of the L.A. Library web site.
Carey: Though I undoubtedly saw the facade before 1952, I don’t remember what it looked like. My mom tells me that we went to the Los Angeles a couple of times in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but my only early memories of any downtown theatres are of the Warner Brother’s and the RKO Hillstreet. My first memory of the facade of the Los Angeles is from about 1960.
I don’t remember what retailers were in the north wing storefronts in 1960, but by 1963 I know there was one of those cheap electronics dealers in one of them, because I bought a radio from them. Whatever company had caused the remodeling to be done was probably gone by then. I’ve always suspected that the owners of the building had allowed the remodeling to be done by a tenant- probably some time in the 1940’s, as that plain style of facade was popular with retailers during that decade. An old city directory (many are available at the downtown library) would give the name of the store’s occupant(s) during that time.
I’m glad to hear that you intend to restore the facade. It’s always bothered me that the north and south wings don’t match.
DanW: “The 2wenty” is the name Regal Entertainment Group has given to the twenty minutes of ads and movie trailers that precede the feature in almost all of their theatres. By giving it what they appear to think is a hip&trendy name, they can pretend that it’s part of the show instead of just a bunch of advertising. They even have a web site for it.
Bill Kallay: The relationship of Southern California’s Edwards theatres and the Los Angeles Times goes back for ages. I remember seeing the Times ad (about 15 seconds long) every week at the various Edwards theatres I attended in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1950’s. It was the only ad the theatres ran (aside from their usual popcorn plug), and the word was that The Times gave free advertising space in the paper for any theatres that ran Times ads on their screens.
I’ve come across a card displayed in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index which refers to an article in the Los Angeles Times of May 14, 1922, which says that the Gore Brothers were going to lease the Omar Theatre on Main Street. That’s the latest date for any reference to the Omar name that I have found so far.
cmcc: As operators of the Cairo, I suspect that the Hansens were owners of the business, though not necessarily of the building (many theatres were built by speculators and then leased to operators.) Most small suburban theatres such as the Cairo were not operated by circuits, but by independent business people. ronp’s comments on the Atlantic Theatre indicate that the Hansens actually owned that theatre building, but say only that they “operated” the Cairo. Whether they owned the Cairo building or not, it seems likely that they were the independent owners of the business, at least until 1941.
cmmc: The first comment above by ronp says that Ivan and Eula Hanson ran the Cairo for 12 years before they built the Atlantic Theatre in Long Beach in 1941, so they must have been the operators in 1933.
I didn’t know there was a Mickey Mouse Club as early as 1933. I searched on Google, and found that the first Mickey Mouse Club of the era was formed at the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park, California in 1929. In 1932 the club reached one million members. (This information from an official Disney Company page.)
Here is a link to a PDF file (only 180K, so easily downloaded) which is mostly about copyright law, and apparently has to do with a court case, but which discusses the early Micky Mouse Clubs for several pages, beginning on page 10.
Just so everybody will know: I’m NOT related to Mike Vogel.
If the building the theatre is in has 40,000 square feet, then four million dollars doesn’t seem an excessive price. The citizens of Anchorage are passing up a bargain. Their descendants will regret this lost opportunity.
In case anyone looks this far back in the news archives: This is not the Alcazar Theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, located at 260 O'Farrell Street. The Geary Street Alcazar, originally built as the Islam Temple for the Shriners, only took on the name Alcazar some time after the demolition of the O'Farrell Street Alcazar. I have no information on whether or not the Geary Street Alcazar has ever operated as a movie theatre.
The photo at the Noe Hill web site, linked above by TC on Sep 27, 2005, depicts a different Alcazar Theatre, at 650 Geary Street, built in 1917 as a Shriner’s temple, designed by architect T. Patterson Ross. Some time after the O'Farrell Street Alcazar was demolished, the former Islam Temple on Geary Street became a legitimate theatre and took on the name Alcazar. I have no information on whether or not the Geary Street Alcazar has ever been used as a movie theatre, but as of 2006 it is still in operation as a live theatre.
Harkins Bricktown Cinemas will be one of the venues for Oklahoma City’s deadCENTER film festival again this year, June 7-11, 2006. Harkins may be a megaplex corporation, but they do give some support to independent films.
ken mc: I just saw you question from last December. The Cairo would have been in the block just south of 110th Street, which was almost ¾ of a mile south of Century- in fact, only a few blocks north of Imperial Highway.
Ken Roe posted a list of the 24 theatres being operated by the Edwards Circuit in 1950, and the Cairo (unless there were two theatres of that name in Los Angeles at the time) was among them. The list as in one of the comments on the page for the El Cameo Theater.
Will, the Historic American Buildings Survey data on the Tivoli goes so far as to say that the theatre was “…reputedly one of the first five public buildings in the United States to be air conditioned.” The claim sounded a bit extravagant to me, which is why I softened it to “…one of the first in the nation….” As the survey was done in 1974, perhaps not much information on the early history of air conditioning in America had yet been compiled. I do know that it was not yet a commonplace feature of public buildings at the time, but it also seemed unlikely that the Tivoli would have had only the fifth plant ever installed in an American public building.
According to this article, the first public building in the U.S. to have a modern air conditioning plant was the J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit, in 1924. I don’t know how rapidly air conditioning spread in the following years, but I do know that it remained a fairly costly luxury until after WWII. As late as the 1950’s, I recall that among the dozen or so theatres in the area where I lived a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles, none were yet air conditioned. The nearest air conditioned theatre I knew of was the United Artists in Pasadena.
William, are you sure about the Skouras-ization of the Palace in 1947? When I began going to the theatre in the early 1960’s, the auditorium had the same, ornate Renaissance decor seen in old photographs of it (and the style “Renaissance” needs to be added to the theatre’s information at the top of the page, buy the way.) I don’t remember the lobby as clearly, but I certainly don’t recall it having any of the art moderne style for which Skouras was so famous. I do know that the ticket foyer had had its ornate decoration largely covered over by then, but it wasn’t particularly art moderne, either- just sort of bland. If Skouras was responsible for that, it wasn’t one of his better designs.
Original announcements of new theatres sometimes exaggerated the seating capacity a bit, and sometimes the plans were altered between the time of the announcement and the actual beginning of construction, and the capacity would end up a bit larger or smaller than originally announced.
It was also fairly common for a theatre to be reseated during its lifetime, most often by installing wider seats, sometimes by more extensive alterations that increased leg room by reducing the number of rows, and either of these would thus reduce the seating capacity. There were also some occasions when seating capacities of a theatre went up. This happened most often when a theatre originally built with an orchestra pit would have the pit covered over and a couple of rows of seats added in the new floor space.
The American Memory web site of the Library of Congress contains some information about the Tivoli (click on “Historic Buildings” link under “Architecture, Landscape” heading, then enter “Tivoli Chattanooga” in the search box.)
The site has twelve data pages about the Tivoli from the Historic American Buildings Survey (there are also ten photographs of the theatre.) According to the survey, the architects were C.W. and George L. Rapp, with Chattanooga architect R.H. Hunt associated. The survey also says that the auditorium had a seating capacity at opening of 2,300, and its greatest dimensions were 100'x126'.
The official opening of the Tivoli was March 19, 1921, with the movie “Forbidden Fruit” and Mae Murray, the star of the movie, made a personal appearance. The first talking picture seen in Chattanooga premiered at the Tivoli on July 9, 1928. Chattanooga’s first CinemaScope screen was installed in the Tivoli in 1953. It was 45' wide and 25' high, with a 4' inward curve.
In 1931, the Tivoli became the first public building in Chattanooga (and one of the first in the nation) to install an air conditioning system, a Carrier plant built in Germany that year.
From its opening in 1921 until 1957- almost its entire history as a movie theatre- the manager of the Tivoli was Mr. Emmet Rogers. The Tivoli closed as a movie theatre on August 17, 1961.
On the Tivoli’s Wurlitzer organ, the survey has this to say (the survey dates from 1974):
“The first major addition was that of a new organ in 1924. This Wurlitzer pipe organ was built in 1921 and purchased by a theater in San Diego for $25,000. In 1924 the Tivoli bought it and sent it back to the Wurlitzer factory in North Tonawanda, New York for renovation. It was used in the Tivoli from 1924-1939 when it was shut down. It was removed from the orchestra pit and put backstage…. After 24 years the organ was restored in 1965 by five local members of the Association of Theater Organ Enthusiasts and was put at the left of the stage.”
There is considerably more information about the theatre in the survey, which is available for download from the web site as 12 high resolution compressed TIFF files (viewable in most popular image viewer programs) of about 20 to 40 K each.
The description for this theatre says that it was opened in 1912 and then renovated in 1927. But the page at Carthalia containing the old postcard (linked in the comment by TC above) contains text that reads “NB: The building is not identical with another "Varsity Theatre”, built 1912 at another site on University Avenue and later converted to a restaurant."
There is a photograph of that earlier Varsity Theatre at the web site of the Palo Alto Historical Association. Another photo of the first Varsity at the same web site has text indicating that it was located in the block west of Bryant Street. The Google map for the new Varsity shows its location as being a block and a half EAST of Bryant Street, and on the opposite side of University Avenue from the original Varsity Theatre.
So Carthalia is apparently correct, and the new Varsity was not a renovation of the earlier theatre, but an entirely new building in a different location.
I’m inclined to agree with Cinecitta that this building is unlikely to have been used for movies. An article in the Amador Ledger Dispatch of January 9th, 2003, contains a single line saying “The Claypiper Theatre across the highway, long the home of laughter-filled melodramas whose actors filled the motel rooms, is now an antique store.” So the Claypiper was, at least for part of its history, one of those theatres that presented vintage, Victorian-style “cheer the hero and hiss the villain” plays for tourists visiting the gold rush country.
The photograph of the balcony shows that it has a row of windows overlooking the street. Exterior windows are unlikely things to find in a movie house. An even more convincing bit of evidence is the fact that there’s no room up there for a projection booth, and it doesn’t look as though there could have been one squeezed onto the ground floor either.
Still, I suppose there’s always the possibility that the theatre did show movies at some time in the past (the silent era, perhaps), with really heavy coverings over those windows, and the projector set up in the balcony itself— provided it is an actual old building. I live in the Sierra region myself, and I know that fake old-time buildings are still being built here, and you can never be sure if something that looks 19th century has really been around that long or was built only thirty or forty years ago.
On the evidence so far, though, I’d say this building was probably never a movie house.
The principal architect of Salem’s Elsinore Theatre was Ellis F. Lawrence, with associate Fred S. Allyn, both of the firm of Lawrence and Holford. Lawrence was later to become the founding dean of the University of Oregon School of Architecture.
ken mc: Are the directories in that room on open shelves? It’s possible that they keep the L.A. directories in a closed area, and available only on request, as they’d probably be the most popular, and thus the ones most likely to become damaged or lost if kept on open shelves. Also, a lot of the old reference materials in the library have been put in storage after being made available on microfilm or microfiche. The library’s web site contains a City Directories Index search page, but I haven’t figured out how to use it.
Carey: The L.A. Public Library’s on-line photo database contains at least these two pictures of the Palace, c1928, with the “Broadway Palace” name on it:
Front View
Side View.
The information about the name “News Palace” (adopted in 1939) is covered in my comment of Dec. 8, 2004, near the top of this page. I’ve never seen the Daily Variety article itself; only the index card displayed in the California Index section of the L.A. Library web site.
Carey: Though I undoubtedly saw the facade before 1952, I don’t remember what it looked like. My mom tells me that we went to the Los Angeles a couple of times in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but my only early memories of any downtown theatres are of the Warner Brother’s and the RKO Hillstreet. My first memory of the facade of the Los Angeles is from about 1960.
I don’t remember what retailers were in the north wing storefronts in 1960, but by 1963 I know there was one of those cheap electronics dealers in one of them, because I bought a radio from them. Whatever company had caused the remodeling to be done was probably gone by then. I’ve always suspected that the owners of the building had allowed the remodeling to be done by a tenant- probably some time in the 1940’s, as that plain style of facade was popular with retailers during that decade. An old city directory (many are available at the downtown library) would give the name of the store’s occupant(s) during that time.
I’m glad to hear that you intend to restore the facade. It’s always bothered me that the north and south wings don’t match.
DanW: “The 2wenty” is the name Regal Entertainment Group has given to the twenty minutes of ads and movie trailers that precede the feature in almost all of their theatres. By giving it what they appear to think is a hip&trendy name, they can pretend that it’s part of the show instead of just a bunch of advertising. They even have a web site for it.
Bill Kallay: The relationship of Southern California’s Edwards theatres and the Los Angeles Times goes back for ages. I remember seeing the Times ad (about 15 seconds long) every week at the various Edwards theatres I attended in the San Gabriel Valley in the 1950’s. It was the only ad the theatres ran (aside from their usual popcorn plug), and the word was that The Times gave free advertising space in the paper for any theatres that ran Times ads on their screens.
I’ve come across a card displayed in the L.A. Public Library’s California Index which refers to an article in the Los Angeles Times of May 14, 1922, which says that the Gore Brothers were going to lease the Omar Theatre on Main Street. That’s the latest date for any reference to the Omar name that I have found so far.
cmcc: As operators of the Cairo, I suspect that the Hansens were owners of the business, though not necessarily of the building (many theatres were built by speculators and then leased to operators.) Most small suburban theatres such as the Cairo were not operated by circuits, but by independent business people. ronp’s comments on the Atlantic Theatre indicate that the Hansens actually owned that theatre building, but say only that they “operated” the Cairo. Whether they owned the Cairo building or not, it seems likely that they were the independent owners of the business, at least until 1941.
cmmc: The first comment above by ronp says that Ivan and Eula Hanson ran the Cairo for 12 years before they built the Atlantic Theatre in Long Beach in 1941, so they must have been the operators in 1933.
I didn’t know there was a Mickey Mouse Club as early as 1933. I searched on Google, and found that the first Mickey Mouse Club of the era was formed at the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park, California in 1929. In 1932 the club reached one million members. (This information from an official Disney Company page.)
Here is a link to a PDF file (only 180K, so easily downloaded) which is mostly about copyright law, and apparently has to do with a court case, but which discusses the early Micky Mouse Clubs for several pages, beginning on page 10.
Just so everybody will know: I’m NOT related to Mike Vogel.
If the building the theatre is in has 40,000 square feet, then four million dollars doesn’t seem an excessive price. The citizens of Anchorage are passing up a bargain. Their descendants will regret this lost opportunity.
The Alhambra Theater was designated an official San Francisco landmark on February 21, 1996.
In case anyone looks this far back in the news archives: This is not the Alcazar Theatre listed on Cinema Treasures, located at 260 O'Farrell Street. The Geary Street Alcazar, originally built as the Islam Temple for the Shriners, only took on the name Alcazar some time after the demolition of the O'Farrell Street Alcazar. I have no information on whether or not the Geary Street Alcazar has ever operated as a movie theatre.
The photo at the Noe Hill web site, linked above by TC on Sep 27, 2005, depicts a different Alcazar Theatre, at 650 Geary Street, built in 1917 as a Shriner’s temple, designed by architect T. Patterson Ross. Some time after the O'Farrell Street Alcazar was demolished, the former Islam Temple on Geary Street became a legitimate theatre and took on the name Alcazar. I have no information on whether or not the Geary Street Alcazar has ever been used as a movie theatre, but as of 2006 it is still in operation as a live theatre.
There is a link to a virtual tour of this theatre on the Coronado page of the Rockford Centre Events web site.
Address: 2535 Pacific Coast Highway (per stevorini’s comment of April 14, 2005, now about midpoint on this page.)
The U.A. Torrance was located at 2735 Pacific Coast Highway, according to the theater listings in The Los Angeles Times of February 10th, 1971.
Harkins Bricktown Cinemas will be one of the venues for Oklahoma City’s deadCENTER film festival again this year, June 7-11, 2006. Harkins may be a megaplex corporation, but they do give some support to independent films.
The opening day of the Edwards Alhambra Place Cinemas was May 24th, 1985, according to the ad displayed at the Making Movies web site.
ken mc: I just saw you question from last December. The Cairo would have been in the block just south of 110th Street, which was almost ¾ of a mile south of Century- in fact, only a few blocks north of Imperial Highway.
Ken Roe posted a list of the 24 theatres being operated by the Edwards Circuit in 1950, and the Cairo (unless there were two theatres of that name in Los Angeles at the time) was among them. The list as in one of the comments on the page for the El Cameo Theater.
Here is the official web site of the Vine Cinema. No pictures of the theatre, unfortunately, except a small shot of the marquee.
Will, the Historic American Buildings Survey data on the Tivoli goes so far as to say that the theatre was “…reputedly one of the first five public buildings in the United States to be air conditioned.” The claim sounded a bit extravagant to me, which is why I softened it to “…one of the first in the nation….” As the survey was done in 1974, perhaps not much information on the early history of air conditioning in America had yet been compiled. I do know that it was not yet a commonplace feature of public buildings at the time, but it also seemed unlikely that the Tivoli would have had only the fifth plant ever installed in an American public building.
According to this article, the first public building in the U.S. to have a modern air conditioning plant was the J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit, in 1924. I don’t know how rapidly air conditioning spread in the following years, but I do know that it remained a fairly costly luxury until after WWII. As late as the 1950’s, I recall that among the dozen or so theatres in the area where I lived a few miles east of downtown Los Angeles, none were yet air conditioned. The nearest air conditioned theatre I knew of was the United Artists in Pasadena.
William, are you sure about the Skouras-ization of the Palace in 1947? When I began going to the theatre in the early 1960’s, the auditorium had the same, ornate Renaissance decor seen in old photographs of it (and the style “Renaissance” needs to be added to the theatre’s information at the top of the page, buy the way.) I don’t remember the lobby as clearly, but I certainly don’t recall it having any of the art moderne style for which Skouras was so famous. I do know that the ticket foyer had had its ornate decoration largely covered over by then, but it wasn’t particularly art moderne, either- just sort of bland. If Skouras was responsible for that, it wasn’t one of his better designs.
Original announcements of new theatres sometimes exaggerated the seating capacity a bit, and sometimes the plans were altered between the time of the announcement and the actual beginning of construction, and the capacity would end up a bit larger or smaller than originally announced.
It was also fairly common for a theatre to be reseated during its lifetime, most often by installing wider seats, sometimes by more extensive alterations that increased leg room by reducing the number of rows, and either of these would thus reduce the seating capacity. There were also some occasions when seating capacities of a theatre went up. This happened most often when a theatre originally built with an orchestra pit would have the pit covered over and a couple of rows of seats added in the new floor space.
The American Memory web site of the Library of Congress contains some information about the Tivoli (click on “Historic Buildings” link under “Architecture, Landscape” heading, then enter “Tivoli Chattanooga” in the search box.)
The site has twelve data pages about the Tivoli from the Historic American Buildings Survey (there are also ten photographs of the theatre.) According to the survey, the architects were C.W. and George L. Rapp, with Chattanooga architect R.H. Hunt associated. The survey also says that the auditorium had a seating capacity at opening of 2,300, and its greatest dimensions were 100'x126'.
The official opening of the Tivoli was March 19, 1921, with the movie “Forbidden Fruit” and Mae Murray, the star of the movie, made a personal appearance. The first talking picture seen in Chattanooga premiered at the Tivoli on July 9, 1928. Chattanooga’s first CinemaScope screen was installed in the Tivoli in 1953. It was 45' wide and 25' high, with a 4' inward curve.
In 1931, the Tivoli became the first public building in Chattanooga (and one of the first in the nation) to install an air conditioning system, a Carrier plant built in Germany that year.
From its opening in 1921 until 1957- almost its entire history as a movie theatre- the manager of the Tivoli was Mr. Emmet Rogers. The Tivoli closed as a movie theatre on August 17, 1961.
On the Tivoli’s Wurlitzer organ, the survey has this to say (the survey dates from 1974):
There is considerably more information about the theatre in the survey, which is available for download from the web site as 12 high resolution compressed TIFF files (viewable in most popular image viewer programs) of about 20 to 40 K each.The description for this theatre says that it was opened in 1912 and then renovated in 1927. But the page at Carthalia containing the old postcard (linked in the comment by TC above) contains text that reads “NB: The building is not identical with another "Varsity Theatre”, built 1912 at another site on University Avenue and later converted to a restaurant."
There is a photograph of that earlier Varsity Theatre at the web site of the Palo Alto Historical Association. Another photo of the first Varsity at the same web site has text indicating that it was located in the block west of Bryant Street. The Google map for the new Varsity shows its location as being a block and a half EAST of Bryant Street, and on the opposite side of University Avenue from the original Varsity Theatre.
So Carthalia is apparently correct, and the new Varsity was not a renovation of the earlier theatre, but an entirely new building in a different location.
I’m inclined to agree with Cinecitta that this building is unlikely to have been used for movies. An article in the Amador Ledger Dispatch of January 9th, 2003, contains a single line saying “The Claypiper Theatre across the highway, long the home of laughter-filled melodramas whose actors filled the motel rooms, is now an antique store.” So the Claypiper was, at least for part of its history, one of those theatres that presented vintage, Victorian-style “cheer the hero and hiss the villain” plays for tourists visiting the gold rush country.
The photograph of the balcony shows that it has a row of windows overlooking the street. Exterior windows are unlikely things to find in a movie house. An even more convincing bit of evidence is the fact that there’s no room up there for a projection booth, and it doesn’t look as though there could have been one squeezed onto the ground floor either.
Still, I suppose there’s always the possibility that the theatre did show movies at some time in the past (the silent era, perhaps), with really heavy coverings over those windows, and the projector set up in the balcony itself— provided it is an actual old building. I live in the Sierra region myself, and I know that fake old-time buildings are still being built here, and you can never be sure if something that looks 19th century has really been around that long or was built only thirty or forty years ago.
On the evidence so far, though, I’d say this building was probably never a movie house.
The principal architect of Salem’s Elsinore Theatre was Ellis F. Lawrence, with associate Fred S. Allyn, both of the firm of Lawrence and Holford. Lawrence was later to become the founding dean of the University of Oregon School of Architecture.