Do you happen to know the years during which the Lux Radio Theater was broadcast from the old Music Box (now Henry Fonda) Theater on Hollywood Boulevard? I know that the show started in New York City, then moved to Hollywood, where it was broadcast both from the CBS Playhouse and the Music Box, but I don’t know which theater was used first, or for how long each was used.
You can find some pictures of some of Hunt’s other buildings, particularly his work at Occidental College, online in the Robert Winter Collection, which is maintained by Occidental. Their campus, located in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, is worth a visit, too.
The Patterson is no longer closed. It re-opened on May 16th, 2003, as an arts center and theater operated by Creative Alliance
Their web site describes the facility as providing two galleries, a 250 seat flexible theater, a classroom, media lab, offices, and live/work studios for artists. The address is now given as 3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore MD 21224, and the telephone number as 410-276-1651. Their e-mail address is
The web site’s brief history of the theater says that there was an earlier Patterson Theater built at the same location in 1910, which was demolished in 1929. The current building was opened in September, 1930, twinned in 1975, and closed in 1995. When opened in 1929, the Patterson was operated by the Grand Theater Company, an affiliate of Durkee Enterprises. The history page also mentions the marquee and the art deco sign, lighted by “a plethora of bulbs,” but it appears to be referring to the blade sign only. At least that feature was able to be saved and restored.
I have run across mentions of S. Charles Lee having remodeled a “Studio Theater” on Vine Street in 1936, but thought they were mistaken, because there was a Studio Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This clears up the mystery.
I’ve never seen a picture of Mr. Woodley (Frank Erwin Woodley was his full name, I believe, and he was born in 1865, so he would have been the right age to be balding), but I can easily imagine any exhibitor of the day jumping at the chance to be in a movie. Think of the talk it would generate among the theatre’s patrons, and their friends and acquaintances, and the consequent increase in business!
It’s undoubtedly difficult to spot specific locations of the city in old movies, not only because of the way the movie scenes were shot out of sequence, but because so many places in Los Angeles looked so much like so many other places in Los Angeles. So much of the city was built over such a short time that all the buildings ended up being in designed in the same few styles.
Maybe someday you’ll run across an identified interior photograph of that theatre in “Career” and recognize it.
The only old pictures I’ve seen of the Vine Street Theater (all exterior shots, unfortunately) are those few in the L.A. Public Library photo database. (Click on the “Photo Collection” link, use the search terms “Theater Vine Street” and choose the search type “Subject Headings” from the menu. That brings up nine pictures. Some are of the building while under construction, some after completion.
I also know that the first alteration to the Vine Street Theater came as early as 1936, when S. Charles Lee designed a new marquee, and new heating and ventilating systems were installed. Lee sometimes did sketches of buildings to which he made alterations. If he made any of the Vine STreet, then they would probably be in the collection of his drawings and papers which, I believe, is held by UCLA. Since he made a major change only to the outside of this theater, though, he might not have bothered to make any interior sketches.
When Huntington Hartford bought the place in the 1950s, the remodeling he ordered was so complete that almost nothing remained of the original theatre but the outer walls. There are probably photographs of the old interior somewhere in the world- in old magazines and such, perhaps- but I have no idea where to find them.
The place also went by the name Mirror Theater for a while, but I don’t know if that was before or after it was the Huntington Hartford Theater. If it was earlier, then pictures of it from before the rebuilding might be sought out by that name as well as by the original name.
I remember when the book store moved from it’s original location on the northwest corner of Garfield and Main into the building that had once been half of Montgomery Ward’s Department Store. (The other half of Ward’s had been in the building with the small art deco tower on it, one door to the west, which later was renovated and occupied by Prober’s Shoes.) They had the biggest selection of paperbacks in the San Gabriel Valley after they moved to the new location. The place was huge.
The book store opened in its original location about 1964 or 1965, and was owned by the people who had formerly operated the Bungalow News on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. The store had been busier when it was at the corner of Garfield, even though the new location was bigger. I think they made a mistake by moving it. That mid-block location at the east end of town wasn’t as visible. They probably weren’t helped by the opening of a Waldenbooks on the Mervyn’s center in the early 1980s, either.
The Garfield didn’t have a balcony. You must be thinking of the Monterey Theatre, on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park, which had a section of stadium seating in the back half of the auditorium. It was the only theatre in the area that had that arrangement, and none of the theatres in Alhambra ever had a balcony of any sort.
The Garfield Theatre, less than a mile north of the Monterey, at the corner of Garfield and Valley in Alhambra, had the rest rooms upstairs, on either side of the projection room, and there were small anterooms adjacent to them that had glazed windows overlooking the auditorium. The one adjacent to the Women’s rest room was probably used as a crying room, and might have had seating- I don’t know, since I never went up there. The one next to the men’s room had no seats, though, but you would often find guys using it as a smoking room, since smoking wasn’t allowed in the auditorium itself.
I attended the Whittwood only once, in the mid-1980s. The theatre did indeed have a stadium-type seating section at the back of the auditorium. This was a feature it shared in common with only a few theatres in the Los Angles area, among which were the 1917 Rialto on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, the 1924 Monterey in Monterey Park, and the more recent Loyola in the Westchester district of Los Angeles, and Crest in Long Beach.
I used to go to the Monterey frequently in the 1950s, and always liked sitting in the stadium section, though nobody called it that in those days. Everybody, including the theatre manager and staff, referred to it as the balcony, even though it wasn’t a proper balcony at all. The Whittwood was a much nicer theatre than the Monterey, though. In any case, both of them are gone now, along with the Crest, and the Loyola has been converted to offices, and the Rialto sits dark and empty, its lobby used for retail shops. These theatres were ahead of their time, and now they all but forgotten by most of the world.
It might be of interest to some that the architect of this theatre, William H. Wheeler, was also the architect of the very theatrical 5500 seat Angelus Temple, built in 1923 in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, for the notorious radio Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. There were few who understood show business as well as did Sister Aimee. She chose her architect well.
Southwest Builder and Contractor, June 4th, 1920, says that Walter P. Williams had the contract for the construction of a theatre building on Grand Avenue, Escondido, to seat 625 persons, and that work would commence at once. The owner of the theater was named as A. H. Nelson.
Southwest Builder and Contractor of April 23rd, 1937, announced that Clifford Balch had prepared the plans for a theatre at Escondido. The name of the theatre was not given in my source, but the timing was right for it to be the Ritz.
The earlier publication, Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer, issue of September 18th, 1909, mentions a theatre (again, no name given) that was to be erected at 5th and B Streets, Escondido, for a Mr. John Johnston, Jr. Apparently, the Johnston family was in the theatre business in Escondido for a long time.
The web site Silent Era lists a Jewel Theatre, with 700 seats, at 3829 Whittier Boulevard, operating in 1925. The source cited is Film Daily’s Film Year Book for 1926, page 485, with additional information provided by Lars Hedlind. Perhaps the discrepancy in address is the result of a remodeling which moved the entrance, or a street renumbering? Or perhaps the original theatre was destroyed, and replaced by this building in the 1930s?
The Hill Street Theatre opened on March 20th, 1922. It was built by the Orpheum Circuit as one of their “Junior Circuit” houses, which featured continuous Vaudeville shows of five acts, with only one headliner, alternating with movies, all day long. (The regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show a day houses, strictly for Vaudeville, with more acts, more headliners, more elaborate staging and costumes and, of course, higher ticket prices.)
It was re-opened as the RKO Theatre on September 11th, 1929, but popular usage of the earlier name led the RKO circuit to begin advertising it as the RKO Hillstreet Theatre.
In its later years, it was operated simply as the Hillstreet Theatre by Metropolitan Theatres, which occasionally used the big stage for live music shows, but mostly ran movies. As downtown movie going declined in the late 1950s, the Hillstreet suffered more, and earlier, than did the somewhat smaller theatres on busier Broadway. I attended movies there several times from 1961-1963, and even on Friday and Saturday evenings, the sparse audiences, sometimes no more than a few dozen patrons, were lost in the cavernous auditorium. The closing of the Hillstreet was announced in a Los Angeles Times article of April 29th, 1963. It was demolished not long after.
The Hillstreet was not the most beautiful of downtown theatres, but I miss it as much as any of them, as it is the first theatre other than my neighborhood house of which I have any clear memory, dating from the late 1940s- early 1950s, when we went to an occasional matinee there. I can still see the shiny aluminum railings of the stairway to the balcony (where we never sat, which made it all the more desirable), and the five big oval reveals in the orchestra floor ceiling under the balcony, each lined with lights concealed in its coved edges and under a pendant fixture in the center of each reveal, so that each was a big, oval doughnut-shape of soft light. At the age of five, I thought it was about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’m glad that I had the chance to refresh my memory by seeing it again, a dozen years later, before this theatre was taken away forever.
In 1926, when the Orpheum Circuit moved to its new theatre further down Broadway, this Orpheum was given the name Broadway Palace, which was displayed on the marquee and used in advertisements for the theatre. The name didn’t become simply the Palace Theatre until sometime later. The inclusion of the street name in the theatre’s name may have been to distinguish it from an earlier Palace Theatre which had been located nearby on Seventh Street, and which had closed only a few years before.
It’s interesting that the Optic was owned by Woodley. There was a Woodley’s Theater on Broadway at that time, on the site where the fourth Orpheum was later built. This Woodley’s was later renamed the Victory, and then was purchased by Mack Sennett in 1920, remodeled and expanded and renamed the Mission. So there’s another connection between Sennett and Woodley.
I wonder if the Woodley’s/Victory on Broadway could have been the more ornate second theatre you mentioned? Does “A Movie Star” include any scenes of that theatre’s surroundings, so that its location might be identifiable as the middle of the 800 block of Broadway? Hamburger’s Department Store (later the May Company) was just up the block across the street, and the Garrick Theater on the southeast corner of 8th was only a few doors up from Woodley’s. The Majestic would have been across the street and south a bit, and Tally’s original Broadway probably almost directly across the street. Broadway also makes that bend at Olympic Boulevard, so a scene looking south might have revealed that, though I’m not sure in what year Broadway was cut through that block.
Here’s another interesting puzzle. Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer issue of September 2nd, 1916, contains an announcement that architect Edward J. Borgmeyer had completed plans for a moving picture theatre at South Pasadena for a Mr. Edward N. Jarecki. The estimated cost is given as $25,000.
The same publication, in its issue of September 23rd, the same year, announced that a brick structure, one story, 3 rooms, would be built at a cost of $8500 at 804-806 Fair Oaks Avenue, South Pasadena, for Ella M. Jerecki.
Despite the variant spellings Jarecki/Jerecki, they must have been the same family, but were both of these buildings built? Was the second, smaller building built next door to the theatre, at 806? I remember seeing the Ritz back in the early 1950s, and the building was obviously a very old one- certainly older than the Rialto. It must have been the theatre referred to in the article.
The Fox Van Nuys Theatre was built in 1924, by a Mr. Burnis R. Shacklett, owner of Shacklett’s Valley Furniture Store. He converted part of his furniture store into the theatre’s lobby, and the auditorium was constructed behind the existing shops.
This theatre was built, for himself, by a Mr. U.G. Hubbs, as was announced in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of March 21st, 1924. It was listed as the Castle Theatre in the Los Angeles City Directory for 1926, but the address at that time was given as 8518 S. San Pedro Street.
The impression I got from the outside was that there wasn’t even a real theatre in there, but just a bunch of seats stuck into a former retail space some time after the building was built. But then, maybe the entrance foyer itself was bigger to begin with, and part of it was converted to retail shops later on, to bring in more rent after the Main Street theatre district began to decline. I never examined the building carefully, so I don’t remember how deep those shops next to the theatre were.
In fact, I don’t even remember how high the building was, or how far up from the intersection of 6th Street it was, though it wasn’t too far, I know, because I recall being able to see the place quite clearly from the southeast corner of 6th and Main, out in front of Whelan’s Drug Store.
Not demolished in the 1960s, but it was about then that the Cozy was renamed the Astro. I think that in the ‘80s, the Astro was still operating, showing Spanish language movies. I didn’t like the new marquee signs on the Astro. The old Cozy marquee was one of my Broadway favorites- very small, but with the theatre name in big chunky letters that had a very 1930-ish streamline modern quality.
I’m sure that the Astro was the Cozy. I remember that the Astro had tacky mid-late 1960s signage, so the renaming probably came at that time. I know it was still the Cozy in the 1961-1962 era. I liked the old Cozy marquee, with the name in big, chunky, block neon letters.
Not in South Central L.A., but right downtown, across the street from the Million Dollar Theatre, near the very northern end of the Broadway theatre district. I don’t remember ever seeing this building when it was still a theatre, but it must have been almost next door to the Bradbury Building.
Ken:
Do you happen to know the years during which the Lux Radio Theater was broadcast from the old Music Box (now Henry Fonda) Theater on Hollywood Boulevard? I know that the show started in New York City, then moved to Hollywood, where it was broadcast both from the CBS Playhouse and the Music Box, but I don’t know which theater was used first, or for how long each was used.
You can find some pictures of some of Hunt’s other buildings, particularly his work at Occidental College, online in the Robert Winter Collection, which is maintained by Occidental. Their campus, located in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, is worth a visit, too.
The Patterson is no longer closed. It re-opened on May 16th, 2003, as an arts center and theater operated by Creative Alliance
Their web site describes the facility as providing two galleries, a 250 seat flexible theater, a classroom, media lab, offices, and live/work studios for artists. The address is now given as 3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore MD 21224, and the telephone number as 410-276-1651. Their e-mail address is
The web site’s brief history of the theater says that there was an earlier Patterson Theater built at the same location in 1910, which was demolished in 1929. The current building was opened in September, 1930, twinned in 1975, and closed in 1995. When opened in 1929, the Patterson was operated by the Grand Theater Company, an affiliate of Durkee Enterprises. The history page also mentions the marquee and the art deco sign, lighted by “a plethora of bulbs,” but it appears to be referring to the blade sign only. At least that feature was able to be saved and restored.
I have run across mentions of S. Charles Lee having remodeled a “Studio Theater” on Vine Street in 1936, but thought they were mistaken, because there was a Studio Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This clears up the mystery.
I’ve never seen a picture of Mr. Woodley (Frank Erwin Woodley was his full name, I believe, and he was born in 1865, so he would have been the right age to be balding), but I can easily imagine any exhibitor of the day jumping at the chance to be in a movie. Think of the talk it would generate among the theatre’s patrons, and their friends and acquaintances, and the consequent increase in business!
It’s undoubtedly difficult to spot specific locations of the city in old movies, not only because of the way the movie scenes were shot out of sequence, but because so many places in Los Angeles looked so much like so many other places in Los Angeles. So much of the city was built over such a short time that all the buildings ended up being in designed in the same few styles.
Maybe someday you’ll run across an identified interior photograph of that theatre in “Career” and recognize it.
Christian:
The only old pictures I’ve seen of the Vine Street Theater (all exterior shots, unfortunately) are those few in the L.A. Public Library photo database. (Click on the “Photo Collection” link, use the search terms “Theater Vine Street” and choose the search type “Subject Headings” from the menu. That brings up nine pictures. Some are of the building while under construction, some after completion.
I also know that the first alteration to the Vine Street Theater came as early as 1936, when S. Charles Lee designed a new marquee, and new heating and ventilating systems were installed. Lee sometimes did sketches of buildings to which he made alterations. If he made any of the Vine STreet, then they would probably be in the collection of his drawings and papers which, I believe, is held by UCLA. Since he made a major change only to the outside of this theater, though, he might not have bothered to make any interior sketches.
When Huntington Hartford bought the place in the 1950s, the remodeling he ordered was so complete that almost nothing remained of the original theatre but the outer walls. There are probably photographs of the old interior somewhere in the world- in old magazines and such, perhaps- but I have no idea where to find them.
The place also went by the name Mirror Theater for a while, but I don’t know if that was before or after it was the Huntington Hartford Theater. If it was earlier, then pictures of it from before the rebuilding might be sought out by that name as well as by the original name.
I remember when the book store moved from it’s original location on the northwest corner of Garfield and Main into the building that had once been half of Montgomery Ward’s Department Store. (The other half of Ward’s had been in the building with the small art deco tower on it, one door to the west, which later was renovated and occupied by Prober’s Shoes.) They had the biggest selection of paperbacks in the San Gabriel Valley after they moved to the new location. The place was huge.
The book store opened in its original location about 1964 or 1965, and was owned by the people who had formerly operated the Bungalow News on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. The store had been busier when it was at the corner of Garfield, even though the new location was bigger. I think they made a mistake by moving it. That mid-block location at the east end of town wasn’t as visible. They probably weren’t helped by the opening of a Waldenbooks on the Mervyn’s center in the early 1980s, either.
The Garfield didn’t have a balcony. You must be thinking of the Monterey Theatre, on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park, which had a section of stadium seating in the back half of the auditorium. It was the only theatre in the area that had that arrangement, and none of the theatres in Alhambra ever had a balcony of any sort.
The Garfield Theatre, less than a mile north of the Monterey, at the corner of Garfield and Valley in Alhambra, had the rest rooms upstairs, on either side of the projection room, and there were small anterooms adjacent to them that had glazed windows overlooking the auditorium. The one adjacent to the Women’s rest room was probably used as a crying room, and might have had seating- I don’t know, since I never went up there. The one next to the men’s room had no seats, though, but you would often find guys using it as a smoking room, since smoking wasn’t allowed in the auditorium itself.
I attended the Whittwood only once, in the mid-1980s. The theatre did indeed have a stadium-type seating section at the back of the auditorium. This was a feature it shared in common with only a few theatres in the Los Angles area, among which were the 1917 Rialto on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, the 1924 Monterey in Monterey Park, and the more recent Loyola in the Westchester district of Los Angeles, and Crest in Long Beach.
I used to go to the Monterey frequently in the 1950s, and always liked sitting in the stadium section, though nobody called it that in those days. Everybody, including the theatre manager and staff, referred to it as the balcony, even though it wasn’t a proper balcony at all. The Whittwood was a much nicer theatre than the Monterey, though. In any case, both of them are gone now, along with the Crest, and the Loyola has been converted to offices, and the Rialto sits dark and empty, its lobby used for retail shops. These theatres were ahead of their time, and now they all but forgotten by most of the world.
It might be of interest to some that the architect of this theatre, William H. Wheeler, was also the architect of the very theatrical 5500 seat Angelus Temple, built in 1923 in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, for the notorious radio Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. There were few who understood show business as well as did Sister Aimee. She chose her architect well.
Southwest Builder and Contractor, June 4th, 1920, says that Walter P. Williams had the contract for the construction of a theatre building on Grand Avenue, Escondido, to seat 625 persons, and that work would commence at once. The owner of the theater was named as A. H. Nelson.
Southwest Builder and Contractor of April 23rd, 1937, announced that Clifford Balch had prepared the plans for a theatre at Escondido. The name of the theatre was not given in my source, but the timing was right for it to be the Ritz.
The earlier publication, Southwest Contractor and Manufacturer, issue of September 18th, 1909, mentions a theatre (again, no name given) that was to be erected at 5th and B Streets, Escondido, for a Mr. John Johnston, Jr. Apparently, the Johnston family was in the theatre business in Escondido for a long time.
The web site Silent Era lists a Jewel Theatre, with 700 seats, at 3829 Whittier Boulevard, operating in 1925. The source cited is Film Daily’s Film Year Book for 1926, page 485, with additional information provided by Lars Hedlind. Perhaps the discrepancy in address is the result of a remodeling which moved the entrance, or a street renumbering? Or perhaps the original theatre was destroyed, and replaced by this building in the 1930s?
The Hill Street Theatre opened on March 20th, 1922. It was built by the Orpheum Circuit as one of their “Junior Circuit” houses, which featured continuous Vaudeville shows of five acts, with only one headliner, alternating with movies, all day long. (The regular Orpheum Circuit theatres were two-show a day houses, strictly for Vaudeville, with more acts, more headliners, more elaborate staging and costumes and, of course, higher ticket prices.)
It was re-opened as the RKO Theatre on September 11th, 1929, but popular usage of the earlier name led the RKO circuit to begin advertising it as the RKO Hillstreet Theatre.
In its later years, it was operated simply as the Hillstreet Theatre by Metropolitan Theatres, which occasionally used the big stage for live music shows, but mostly ran movies. As downtown movie going declined in the late 1950s, the Hillstreet suffered more, and earlier, than did the somewhat smaller theatres on busier Broadway. I attended movies there several times from 1961-1963, and even on Friday and Saturday evenings, the sparse audiences, sometimes no more than a few dozen patrons, were lost in the cavernous auditorium. The closing of the Hillstreet was announced in a Los Angeles Times article of April 29th, 1963. It was demolished not long after.
The Hillstreet was not the most beautiful of downtown theatres, but I miss it as much as any of them, as it is the first theatre other than my neighborhood house of which I have any clear memory, dating from the late 1940s- early 1950s, when we went to an occasional matinee there. I can still see the shiny aluminum railings of the stairway to the balcony (where we never sat, which made it all the more desirable), and the five big oval reveals in the orchestra floor ceiling under the balcony, each lined with lights concealed in its coved edges and under a pendant fixture in the center of each reveal, so that each was a big, oval doughnut-shape of soft light. At the age of five, I thought it was about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I’m glad that I had the chance to refresh my memory by seeing it again, a dozen years later, before this theatre was taken away forever.
In 1926, when the Orpheum Circuit moved to its new theatre further down Broadway, this Orpheum was given the name Broadway Palace, which was displayed on the marquee and used in advertisements for the theatre. The name didn’t become simply the Palace Theatre until sometime later. The inclusion of the street name in the theatre’s name may have been to distinguish it from an earlier Palace Theatre which had been located nearby on Seventh Street, and which had closed only a few years before.
It’s interesting that the Optic was owned by Woodley. There was a Woodley’s Theater on Broadway at that time, on the site where the fourth Orpheum was later built. This Woodley’s was later renamed the Victory, and then was purchased by Mack Sennett in 1920, remodeled and expanded and renamed the Mission. So there’s another connection between Sennett and Woodley.
I wonder if the Woodley’s/Victory on Broadway could have been the more ornate second theatre you mentioned? Does “A Movie Star” include any scenes of that theatre’s surroundings, so that its location might be identifiable as the middle of the 800 block of Broadway? Hamburger’s Department Store (later the May Company) was just up the block across the street, and the Garrick Theater on the southeast corner of 8th was only a few doors up from Woodley’s. The Majestic would have been across the street and south a bit, and Tally’s original Broadway probably almost directly across the street. Broadway also makes that bend at Olympic Boulevard, so a scene looking south might have revealed that, though I’m not sure in what year Broadway was cut through that block.
Here’s another interesting puzzle. Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer issue of September 2nd, 1916, contains an announcement that architect Edward J. Borgmeyer had completed plans for a moving picture theatre at South Pasadena for a Mr. Edward N. Jarecki. The estimated cost is given as $25,000.
The same publication, in its issue of September 23rd, the same year, announced that a brick structure, one story, 3 rooms, would be built at a cost of $8500 at 804-806 Fair Oaks Avenue, South Pasadena, for Ella M. Jerecki.
Despite the variant spellings Jarecki/Jerecki, they must have been the same family, but were both of these buildings built? Was the second, smaller building built next door to the theatre, at 806? I remember seeing the Ritz back in the early 1950s, and the building was obviously a very old one- certainly older than the Rialto. It must have been the theatre referred to in the article.
The address of the Capri Theatre was 6258 Van Nuys Boulevard.
The Fox Van Nuys Theatre was built in 1924, by a Mr. Burnis R. Shacklett, owner of Shacklett’s Valley Furniture Store. He converted part of his furniture store into the theatre’s lobby, and the auditorium was constructed behind the existing shops.
-Southwest Bulder and Contractor, May 30th, 1924.
This theatre was built, for himself, by a Mr. U.G. Hubbs, as was announced in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of March 21st, 1924. It was listed as the Castle Theatre in the Los Angeles City Directory for 1926, but the address at that time was given as 8518 S. San Pedro Street.
The impression I got from the outside was that there wasn’t even a real theatre in there, but just a bunch of seats stuck into a former retail space some time after the building was built. But then, maybe the entrance foyer itself was bigger to begin with, and part of it was converted to retail shops later on, to bring in more rent after the Main Street theatre district began to decline. I never examined the building carefully, so I don’t remember how deep those shops next to the theatre were.
In fact, I don’t even remember how high the building was, or how far up from the intersection of 6th Street it was, though it wasn’t too far, I know, because I recall being able to see the place quite clearly from the southeast corner of 6th and Main, out in front of Whelan’s Drug Store.
If they did let the mural represent the Garden of Eden, then I suppose Hollywood Boulevard itself could symbolize the Serpent.
Not demolished in the 1960s, but it was about then that the Cozy was renamed the Astro. I think that in the ‘80s, the Astro was still operating, showing Spanish language movies. I didn’t like the new marquee signs on the Astro. The old Cozy marquee was one of my Broadway favorites- very small, but with the theatre name in big chunky letters that had a very 1930-ish streamline modern quality.
I’m sure that the Astro was the Cozy. I remember that the Astro had tacky mid-late 1960s signage, so the renaming probably came at that time. I know it was still the Cozy in the 1961-1962 era. I liked the old Cozy marquee, with the name in big, chunky, block neon letters.
Not in South Central L.A., but right downtown, across the street from the Million Dollar Theatre, near the very northern end of the Broadway theatre district. I don’t remember ever seeing this building when it was still a theatre, but it must have been almost next door to the Bradbury Building.