If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.
It would not surprise me if the Mozart was closed for a while, during the depression years, and re-opened later. I do now vaguely recall having read an article sometime in the early 1960s (perhaps in the L.A. Times, or Los Angeles Magazine) which mentioned a theater on Grand Avenue called the Grand, and said that it had been for a while Downtown’s only art house, during the late 1940s- early 1950s. As the Criterion was already gone by that time, the theater mentioned was probably the Mozart.
In any case, I’m sure that the theater was gone by the early 1960s. My memory of that stretch of Grand Avenue, across the street from Robinson’s Department Store, is fairly dim, but I think that at that time the building just below the alley south of Seventh Street housed a restaurant which had been there for decades, and south of that was only a stretch of parking lots. The restaurant probably had an address of about 720, so the theater building had most likely been next door to it, or another door or two south.
No, I think that would be the theater listed on this site as the Criterion (or Fox Criterion), and which opened as the Kinema, sometime in the early 1920s. The Criterion was in the 600 block of Grand, just north of 7th Street. There are a couple of pictures of it in the L.A. Library photo database (I think the search terms with which I found them were “Theater Kinema”) The Mozart was an older theater, and smaller, I believe. In 1941, it might have been operating as the Orange Grove.
I’ve only seen the plunge and pavillion in old postcards. They were demolished long before I was born, as was (I suspect) the Santa Fe Depot- at least, the railroad quit running passenger trains to the town soon after the Pacific Electric Railway began its regular interurban trolly service to Redondo, which I think was soon after 1900. P.E. may have continued to use the depot itself, but the interurban service was discontinued well before I ever saw the place. I have no clear recollection of a three story building with a steep shingle roof at the pier- but there certainly were plenty of buildings with shingles.
The architect of the Vogue was Paul Hartman, according to the announcement (in Southwest Builder and Contractor of July 11th, 1941), that he had begun the working drawings for the theater. There were to be 900 seats, and the cost was given as $30,000. The owner was John W. Lawson, the theatre was to be leased to Grover L. Smith, and the contractor was to be John T. Bibb. The address (before construction) was given as 733 S. Brand Boulevard.
It will be a minor miracle if this theatre still exists. My memories of Redondo Beach are few, but they go back a long way. There was once a small amusement park just south of the municipal pier, but that must have been demolished at least forty years ago. In the 1960s, the area north of the pier was changed beyond recognition by the construction of the King Harbor Marina. The last time I was in Redondo, sometime in the late 1970s, urban renewal had gotten to the old center of town. The pier was still there, but most of the buildings nearby had been leveled for parking lots.
The pier itself still featured a hodgepodge of ramshackle old buildings, most of them done up in some vaguely “nautical” style, and housing an array of restaurants, fishmongers, and souvenir shops. The theatre might well have been among those buildings, but it was certainly not being used for its original purpose. I wish I’d paid closer attention to the place. John Parkinson was one of my favorite early Los Angeles architects, and I’d be very pleased if this theater survives, even if it only houses a seafood cafe.
I have found this theater listed as one of Los Angeles' principal downtown movie houses in a map book which was probably published about 1950 (the page with the copyright date is missing, but the map of downtown shows the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways still under construction, and rapid transit tracks still running along Aliso Street.) At that time, the theatre was operating under the name Grand Playhouse.
The Glendale Masonic Temple was designed by local architect Arthur George Lindley, of the firm of Lindley & Selkirk. The building was completed in 1928.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of March 1st, 1940, announced that architect C.A. Balch was preparing plans for the State Theatre, for Fox-West Coast.
The previous year, other issues of the same publication had announced plans for a theater on the same site, to have been built for John Drew, named as the operator of the Temple Theater in Glendale. This theater would have had a balcony and a total of 800 seats, but the project was never carried out. The interesting thing about these earlier announcements, though, is that they revealed that the State was built on the site of the former Belvedere Theater, which was destroyed by a fire. The fire story was covered in a Los Angeles Times article of November 21st, 1933.
I walked along this block hundreds of times in the years I lived in Los Angeles, yet cannot remember the building next to the alley. Old pictures of Seventh Street around 1920 show a two-story building with a flat-topped decorative parapet wall rising slightly higher above the center of its facade, and a small marquee-like feature over the entrance. The pictures I’ve seen don’t have enough detail to tell if this was a theater or not.
I remember most of the buildings that were still on that block as late as the 1980s, but I don’t recall if that particular location was still occupied by a two story building. If it is, then the building is most likely the same one that was there in the 1920s, and it might still show some signs of having once been a theater.
The architect of the Vermont Theater was E.J. Borgmeyer. The owner of the building was Mr. Joseph Engert. The cost of construction for the project, including two stores, five office suites, and the theater with pipe organ was set at $100,000. The brick building was 65x170 feet.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 29 July, 1921.
Construction of the Temple Theatre began in late 1921. The contractor was Al Nelson, the owner of the building was F.W. Braun. The architect was H.C. Dockbar.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 21 October, 1921.
Either this theater or the Eagle Theater was probably the one originally called the United Theater, which was referred to in an article in the Highland Park News Herald on July 23rd, 1926, on the occasion of its purchase by Mr. John Sugar, named as the owner of the York Theater. Mr. Sugar sold both of his Eagle Rock theaters and the York theater sometime later, as noted in an article in the Los Angeles Times of December 28th, 1928.
The Cinema Treasures listing of the Eagle Theater (currently listed as being located in Eagle Rock, California rather than Los Angeles) contains no information regarding former names it may have had in the 1920s, though a comment there says that in the 1930s it was called the Yosemite Theater, and later was known as the New Eagle Theater.
The L.A. Public Library photo collection contains an earlier picture of this theater. Apparently, its name when it opened was the Kinema. This name was actually carved into the wall of the side of the building, as clearly shown in the photograph.
I only went to the Tower those two times; First, at the end of 1963, when it was still the Newsreel Theatre, and then again in 1967 after it had gone back to its original name and was showing first run movies. But the doors were so close to the sidewalk that it was easy to see the grand staircase in the lobby every time I passed by. I went to movies downtown mostly during the early 1960s, and had little interest in the fare at the Newsreel, but I went to the other big Broadway theatres many times.
I think that the L.A. Conservancy is still having its Broadway Theatre Tours every Saturday. I’ve heard that the United Artists is no longer available to them, and that the Million Dollar was recently taken off the tour due to falling plaster, so that leaves only the Los Angeles, the Orpheum, the Palace and maybe the Tower as stops on the tour. They try to include three theatres in the tour, but it depends on the availability (for example, if a music video or an ad or a movie is being filmed in one of the theatres, they wouldn’t be able to include that one that week.) I think they charge eight dollars for the tour, and you need to make a reservation a month in advance.
The conservancy also sponsors a program called Last Remaining Seats, which features a series of old movies presented at one or another of the Broadway theatres, and usually one at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. This series usually happens in June, but you’ll have to check on their web site to get the exact dates.
The Palace used to be one of the theatres at which these programs were presented, but it recently suffered some water damage to its projection room, so it may not be available for the series this year, and the Million Dollar is probably off the list too, because of the falling plaster. So this year’s program will probably be confined to the Los Angeles, the Orpheum, and the Alex.
For at least part of the 1920s, this was called Dalton’s Theatre. Presumably, this was between the time the new Pantages opened and 1928, when this theatre became the Arcade.
I have been able to determine that the Meralta was designed by architect Evan Jones, of Hollywood, but I don’t know which of the other proposed theaters on Downey Avenue is which. Whichever one was at the northwest corner of Second Street is the one designed by Newton and Truesdell, but I don’t know which of the theaters that is.
I also know that there was a theater called the Downey that was operating in the early 1920s, and that yet another theater was proposed for an unidentified location on Downey Avenue in 1925. I have only the vaguest memories of Downey Avenue, as it was several miles from where I lived, and I only passed through the town infrequently, usually on Rosemead Boulevard or Firestone.
I remember seeing the Downey, Meralta and Avenue theatres listed in the L.A. Times, but don’t remember a Fiesta theatre at all.
The Garrick was originally called the Hyman Theatre, built by Los Angeles Theatrical promoter Arthr S. Hyman, sometime after 1913 (when the project was first announced.)
Late in 1921, it was remodeled to a design by architect George Edwin Bergstrom. I don’t know if the name change to Garrick Theatre accompanied the reopening, or happened some time earlier.
One of the last houses opened by West Coast Theatres before that circuit was purchased by Willaim Fox, the Oakland was one of the first theaters to have the “Fox” name added to its marquee. The change was announced in Exhibitors Herald-World of March 23rd, 1929.
I am quite surprised to come across a reverse theatre, and to find that there were more of them. However, there is one that is missing from the list above. Though it has sadly been multiplexed, the Pacific Hastings 8 in Pasadena, California, began as a large, single-screen reverse theatre. It was a late-arriving member of this small family, having been built only in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I am wondering if these other reverse theatres shared with the Hastings its other distinguishing feature- the continental seating, an arrangement in which the aisles run up the sides of the theatre and the seats run in unbroken rows across the width of the auditorium. Though the Hastings was not a highly decorated theatre, it was nevertheless an excellent place to see a movie. I had thought it was unique in its arrangement, and always wondered why more had not been built that way. I’m glad to see that at least a few others were.
The architect at Levy and Klein who designed the Granada was Edward E. Eichenbaum.
The original architectural drawings of the Granada are in the possession of the Art Institute of Chicago, and can be viewed there by qualified scholars. (I believe they can be seen only by appointment.)
If the information at Terraserver is accurate, The Glen had not been demolished as of 29 March, 2004. A search on the address 1014 E. Colorado Street, Glendale, provides a link titled “Urban Areas 3/29/2004” which produces a good aerial photo of the location on that date.
The little red arrow intended to mark the address on the photo is displaced two doors to the west, but it is possible to clearly see the Glen Theatre building, and the shadows of the two distinctive towers shown in the photo of the facade on this post. Unless the Glen has been demolished within the last nine months, it is still there, and ought to be listed as closed. If someone in the Glendale area could check the building in person, this could be confirmed.
The downtown Los Angeles Paramount was disposed of earlier. As I recall, it closed in 1962, and was demolished soon after. There was a proposal for a large bank and office skyscraper to be erected on the site at the time, but it fell through, and the corner remained a parking lot until a building for the wholesale jewlery trade was erected there in the late 1970s.
For a while, before the rise of the Wilshire Midtown and Miracle Mile districts, it looked as though the western side of Downtown would become the upscale part of the city. Robinson’s Department Store, many small shops catering to the well-to-do, several of the city’s best clubs, and a number of pricey restaurants opened there in the second and third decades of the century. The Biltmore had an entrance on Grand Avenue, its adjacent theater was right around the corner on Fifth Street, the hotel which became the Mayflower was built across Grand from the Biltmore, the new central library had a side entrance from that street, and the extension of Wilshire Boulevard made Grand Avenue more easily accessible to the auto-driving population of the affluent neighborhoods to the west. Building a new, elite theater on the street probably seemed like a good bet.
I have come across an interesting proposal which was announced in the January 16th, 1925 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor. It said that architect Thomas Lamb had prepared the preliminary plans for a theater extending from Flower Street to Figueroa Street, (the exact block is not given, but it must have been one of those between Fifth and Eighth Streets) for a Mr. Thomas Phillips who was representing a group of New York and San Francisco Capitalists. The mammoth theater would have been bigger than New York’s Roxy, with 6500 seats projected. The building would have been 333x300 feet, and would have had ten elevators.
Had this massive project (covering more than half of one of Downtown’s large blocks) been carried out, it might have helped pull the downtown theater district westward, but I suppose we’ll never know. It’s equally likely that it would have had a fate similar to that of the San Francisco Fox, which was a bit too big and a bit too far up Market Street to survive for long. It is interesting, though, that the last movie theater built downtown was the Laemmle multiplex on Figueroa Street, and that there have been recent proposals for a multiplex to be built on Figueroa somewhere near the Staples Center. Downtown Los Angeles has finally shifted west, but too late for the Criterion.
It would not surprise me if the Mozart was closed for a while, during the depression years, and re-opened later. I do now vaguely recall having read an article sometime in the early 1960s (perhaps in the L.A. Times, or Los Angeles Magazine) which mentioned a theater on Grand Avenue called the Grand, and said that it had been for a while Downtown’s only art house, during the late 1940s- early 1950s. As the Criterion was already gone by that time, the theater mentioned was probably the Mozart.
In any case, I’m sure that the theater was gone by the early 1960s. My memory of that stretch of Grand Avenue, across the street from Robinson’s Department Store, is fairly dim, but I think that at that time the building just below the alley south of Seventh Street housed a restaurant which had been there for decades, and south of that was only a stretch of parking lots. The restaurant probably had an address of about 720, so the theater building had most likely been next door to it, or another door or two south.
No, I think that would be the theater listed on this site as the Criterion (or Fox Criterion), and which opened as the Kinema, sometime in the early 1920s. The Criterion was in the 600 block of Grand, just north of 7th Street. There are a couple of pictures of it in the L.A. Library photo database (I think the search terms with which I found them were “Theater Kinema”) The Mozart was an older theater, and smaller, I believe. In 1941, it might have been operating as the Orange Grove.
I’ve only seen the plunge and pavillion in old postcards. They were demolished long before I was born, as was (I suspect) the Santa Fe Depot- at least, the railroad quit running passenger trains to the town soon after the Pacific Electric Railway began its regular interurban trolly service to Redondo, which I think was soon after 1900. P.E. may have continued to use the depot itself, but the interurban service was discontinued well before I ever saw the place. I have no clear recollection of a three story building with a steep shingle roof at the pier- but there certainly were plenty of buildings with shingles.
The architect of the Vogue was Paul Hartman, according to the announcement (in Southwest Builder and Contractor of July 11th, 1941), that he had begun the working drawings for the theater. There were to be 900 seats, and the cost was given as $30,000. The owner was John W. Lawson, the theatre was to be leased to Grover L. Smith, and the contractor was to be John T. Bibb. The address (before construction) was given as 733 S. Brand Boulevard.
It will be a minor miracle if this theatre still exists. My memories of Redondo Beach are few, but they go back a long way. There was once a small amusement park just south of the municipal pier, but that must have been demolished at least forty years ago. In the 1960s, the area north of the pier was changed beyond recognition by the construction of the King Harbor Marina. The last time I was in Redondo, sometime in the late 1970s, urban renewal had gotten to the old center of town. The pier was still there, but most of the buildings nearby had been leveled for parking lots.
The pier itself still featured a hodgepodge of ramshackle old buildings, most of them done up in some vaguely “nautical” style, and housing an array of restaurants, fishmongers, and souvenir shops. The theatre might well have been among those buildings, but it was certainly not being used for its original purpose. I wish I’d paid closer attention to the place. John Parkinson was one of my favorite early Los Angeles architects, and I’d be very pleased if this theater survives, even if it only houses a seafood cafe.
I have found this theater listed as one of Los Angeles' principal downtown movie houses in a map book which was probably published about 1950 (the page with the copyright date is missing, but the map of downtown shows the Hollywood and Harbor Freeways still under construction, and rapid transit tracks still running along Aliso Street.) At that time, the theatre was operating under the name Grand Playhouse.
The Glendale Masonic Temple was designed by local architect Arthur George Lindley, of the firm of Lindley & Selkirk. The building was completed in 1928.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of March 1st, 1940, announced that architect C.A. Balch was preparing plans for the State Theatre, for Fox-West Coast.
The previous year, other issues of the same publication had announced plans for a theater on the same site, to have been built for John Drew, named as the operator of the Temple Theater in Glendale. This theater would have had a balcony and a total of 800 seats, but the project was never carried out. The interesting thing about these earlier announcements, though, is that they revealed that the State was built on the site of the former Belvedere Theater, which was destroyed by a fire. The fire story was covered in a Los Angeles Times article of November 21st, 1933.
The start of construction on this theater was announced in an article in The Los Angeles Times on August 6th, 1922.
The grand opening was covered in another Times article, published on November 27th, 1923 under the headline “Playhouse elaborate in details.”
I walked along this block hundreds of times in the years I lived in Los Angeles, yet cannot remember the building next to the alley. Old pictures of Seventh Street around 1920 show a two-story building with a flat-topped decorative parapet wall rising slightly higher above the center of its facade, and a small marquee-like feature over the entrance. The pictures I’ve seen don’t have enough detail to tell if this was a theater or not.
I remember most of the buildings that were still on that block as late as the 1980s, but I don’t recall if that particular location was still occupied by a two story building. If it is, then the building is most likely the same one that was there in the 1920s, and it might still show some signs of having once been a theater.
There is now an office building on the theater’s site.
The architect of the Vermont Theater was E.J. Borgmeyer. The owner of the building was Mr. Joseph Engert. The cost of construction for the project, including two stores, five office suites, and the theater with pipe organ was set at $100,000. The brick building was 65x170 feet.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 29 July, 1921.
Construction of the Temple Theatre began in late 1921. The contractor was Al Nelson, the owner of the building was F.W. Braun. The architect was H.C. Dockbar.
Source: Southwest Builder and Contractor, 21 October, 1921.
Either this theater or the Eagle Theater was probably the one originally called the United Theater, which was referred to in an article in the Highland Park News Herald on July 23rd, 1926, on the occasion of its purchase by Mr. John Sugar, named as the owner of the York Theater. Mr. Sugar sold both of his Eagle Rock theaters and the York theater sometime later, as noted in an article in the Los Angeles Times of December 28th, 1928.
The Cinema Treasures listing of the Eagle Theater (currently listed as being located in Eagle Rock, California rather than Los Angeles) contains no information regarding former names it may have had in the 1920s, though a comment there says that in the 1930s it was called the Yosemite Theater, and later was known as the New Eagle Theater.
The L.A. Public Library photo collection contains an earlier picture of this theater. Apparently, its name when it opened was the Kinema. This name was actually carved into the wall of the side of the building, as clearly shown in the photograph.
L. Linares;
I only went to the Tower those two times; First, at the end of 1963, when it was still the Newsreel Theatre, and then again in 1967 after it had gone back to its original name and was showing first run movies. But the doors were so close to the sidewalk that it was easy to see the grand staircase in the lobby every time I passed by. I went to movies downtown mostly during the early 1960s, and had little interest in the fare at the Newsreel, but I went to the other big Broadway theatres many times.
I think that the L.A. Conservancy is still having its Broadway Theatre Tours every Saturday. I’ve heard that the United Artists is no longer available to them, and that the Million Dollar was recently taken off the tour due to falling plaster, so that leaves only the Los Angeles, the Orpheum, the Palace and maybe the Tower as stops on the tour. They try to include three theatres in the tour, but it depends on the availability (for example, if a music video or an ad or a movie is being filmed in one of the theatres, they wouldn’t be able to include that one that week.) I think they charge eight dollars for the tour, and you need to make a reservation a month in advance.
The conservancy also sponsors a program called Last Remaining Seats, which features a series of old movies presented at one or another of the Broadway theatres, and usually one at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. This series usually happens in June, but you’ll have to check on their web site to get the exact dates.
The Palace used to be one of the theatres at which these programs were presented, but it recently suffered some water damage to its projection room, so it may not be available for the series this year, and the Million Dollar is probably off the list too, because of the falling plaster. So this year’s program will probably be confined to the Los Angeles, the Orpheum, and the Alex.
For at least part of the 1920s, this was called Dalton’s Theatre. Presumably, this was between the time the new Pantages opened and 1928, when this theatre became the Arcade.
I have been able to determine that the Meralta was designed by architect Evan Jones, of Hollywood, but I don’t know which of the other proposed theaters on Downey Avenue is which. Whichever one was at the northwest corner of Second Street is the one designed by Newton and Truesdell, but I don’t know which of the theaters that is.
I also know that there was a theater called the Downey that was operating in the early 1920s, and that yet another theater was proposed for an unidentified location on Downey Avenue in 1925. I have only the vaguest memories of Downey Avenue, as it was several miles from where I lived, and I only passed through the town infrequently, usually on Rosemead Boulevard or Firestone.
I remember seeing the Downey, Meralta and Avenue theatres listed in the L.A. Times, but don’t remember a Fiesta theatre at all.
The Garrick was originally called the Hyman Theatre, built by Los Angeles Theatrical promoter Arthr S. Hyman, sometime after 1913 (when the project was first announced.)
Late in 1921, it was remodeled to a design by architect George Edwin Bergstrom. I don’t know if the name change to Garrick Theatre accompanied the reopening, or happened some time earlier.
One of the last houses opened by West Coast Theatres before that circuit was purchased by Willaim Fox, the Oakland was one of the first theaters to have the “Fox” name added to its marquee. The change was announced in Exhibitors Herald-World of March 23rd, 1929.
I am quite surprised to come across a reverse theatre, and to find that there were more of them. However, there is one that is missing from the list above. Though it has sadly been multiplexed, the Pacific Hastings 8 in Pasadena, California, began as a large, single-screen reverse theatre. It was a late-arriving member of this small family, having been built only in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I am wondering if these other reverse theatres shared with the Hastings its other distinguishing feature- the continental seating, an arrangement in which the aisles run up the sides of the theatre and the seats run in unbroken rows across the width of the auditorium. Though the Hastings was not a highly decorated theatre, it was nevertheless an excellent place to see a movie. I had thought it was unique in its arrangement, and always wondered why more had not been built that way. I’m glad to see that at least a few others were.
The architect at Levy and Klein who designed the Granada was Edward E. Eichenbaum.
The original architectural drawings of the Granada are in the possession of the Art Institute of Chicago, and can be viewed there by qualified scholars. (I believe they can be seen only by appointment.)