The oldest reference to the Lyric Theatre I’ve seen is the announcement of the plans to build it which appeared in the January 3rd, 1925 issue of the Los Angeles Times. The L.A. Public Library’s photo database has an early picture of the Lyric, with the notation that it opened on October 22, no year given, but I think we can safely assume that it was 1925, as the Times of May 3rd, 1925 reported that the contract for construction had been let.
The Times of February 10th, 1971 lists the Lyric Theatre in the Independent Theatres section of their movie guide, so the successor company of Fox Theatres had dropped it by then.
The Leimert Theatre building included shops along the street frontage. The dry cleaning establishment occupied part of that commercial space. The photograph is not dated, but looks to be from a few decades ago (the style of the signage looks about 1970s), so there’s a good chance that the cleaners is now gone, too.
After it closed as a theatre, for many years the Leimert was operated as a regional assembly hall by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They restored the theatre, the only major alteration being the replacement of the “Leimert” sign on the tower with a sign that said “Watchtower,” referring to their official organization, The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. I’m not sure if they still use the building or not, but I’m doubtful that it has been converted into a dry cleaning plant.
The pictures to which you linked above do not depict this Meralta Theatre on 1st Street in Los Angeles, but rather the Meralta Theatre in Culver City. There was a third Meralta Theatre, in Downey. All three of the theatres were originally owned by two sisters, Pearl Merrill and Laura Peralta of Culver City. The name of the theatres was derived from the combination of parts of their surnames.
A small picture on this page at Roadside Peek shows the giant cone sign which sits atop what they claim was once the Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor in Montebello. Does it look familiar? Currie’s had shops all over Los Angeles. I well remember their “Mile-High Cones.”
There is indeed some confusion. I’ve never seen this particular picture before, but there is no doubt that the New Broadway it pictures is not the Broadway Theatre near 4th Street. However, the theatre pictured is not between 6th and 7th Streets. It is north of 6th Street. In the background of this picture, you can see the Hotel Hayward, located on the southwest corner of 6th and Spring. Tally’s New Broadway must therefore have been located either on part the large lot where the Arcade Building was later built, or immediately south of it.
I guess this puts the early history of the Broadway Theatre at 428 Broadway back up in the air. Ken Roe’s information above about Tally’s Broadway Theatre at 833 S. Broadway is correct, however. But you are right about there being no Cinema Treasures entry for the New Broadway near 6th Street.
Also a bit odd: Tally’s Broadway was opened at the end of 1909, but this picture of the New Broadway is also dated 1909, which suggest that the New Broadway was at least as old as the Broadway. I wonder, then, why Tally called it New?
The Rosemary Theatre seen in the 1918 movie mentioned in the comment above was not the same building as the Fox Rosemary Theatre. The original Rosemary Theater was located at 6 Ocean Park Pier. It escaped destruction in a fire that swept the pier in 1915, but by 1921 a new Rosemary Theatre had been built, at 2946 Ocean Front Promenade. This newer theatre was itself lost in the fire which completely destroyed the pier in 1924, as well as the adjacent Dome Theatre. The event is described at this web page. The Fox Rosemary Theatre was built following that fire.
Incidentally, the second Rosemary Theatre was located across the Promenade from the site of an earlier theatre called the Wonderland, which was listed in a 1915 directory of Ocean Park as being at 2939 Ocean Front Promenade. I’ve found no later listings of the Wonderland Theatre, so it may have been gone before the second Rosemary was built. There was also another Rosemary Theatre located a mile or so south, on Ocean Front Walk in Venice. I have found listings for that theatre from 1927 to 1933. It was gone by 1936.
The address of the Dome Theatre as listed in telephone directories of the early ‘30s was 3014 Ocean Front Promenade.
An aerial view of the spectacular 1924 conflagration which destroyed both the original Dome theatre and the adjacent amusement piers can be seen at this page.
You can download a free PDF file of the Uptown’s 80th anniversary calender, which features close-up pictures of a dozen of the theatre’s sculptured decorations, from the web site Friends of the Uptown. There’s also a good Links page at this site.
There is a fairly detailed history of the Uptown, with a few small pictures, on this page of Jazz Age Chicago.
The Chicago Uptown is well represented on the web. A Google search on Uptown Theatre Chicago will fetch many links.
I don’t know enough about the software you use to run this site to know if this would be of any use to you, but you might consider using Brad Fitzpatrick’s open-source memcached system to speed things up. I’ve been using LiveJournal, where memcached was first launched, for about four years, and the improvement in the site’s functionality was astonishing when memcached was adopted.
ken mc: I don’t know if this particular movie is available on DVD. There are a couple of DVD compilations of Lloyd’s movies available, but I don’t think that “Safety Last” is among those included. I’ve heard that a Harold Lloyd boxed set, with about a dozen features and many shorts, is due out in November, from New Line Home Video, and this movie may be included in that collection. I haven’t been able to find details about it, though.
The facade of this theater (which looks like an odd hybrid of Spanish Mission and Art Nouveau) may have been removed in 1933. The July 28th issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor of that year says that architect Clifford Balch was preparing plans for the remodeling of the Sunbeam Theater in Highland Park. I don’t know if this was an aborted attempt to renovate and re-open the theater (given that Balch was a well-known theater architect) or if the remodeling was for the conversion of the theatre into the offices for the newspaper.
The Park was gone by the time I became familiar with Highland Park, but Ivers' was still there in the mid-1980s.
If you go to the California Index at the L.A. Public Library’s web site, and search for theatre, Highland, and Park (one word in each of the three search boxes), you will get among the results a link to a PDF file which contains a scanned version of a Highland Park News-Herald article about the Park, published May 19th, 1963 within a week after the theatre’s closure. There is a picture of the theatre’s marquee, lettered to announce the remodeling of the building to become part of People’s Department Store.
The article gives the opening date as May 29th, 1936. The first program was a double feature of “These Three” and “The Return of Jimmy Valentine.” One of the stars of “We Three” was Joel McCrae, who had as a child lived in Highland Park, across Figuroa Street from Sycamore Grove Park.
Diana Ellis: The article also mentions that, in 1936, the Boy’s Market was located at at Avenue 55 and Monte Vista Street.
The only theatre I remember as being north of Santa Monica on Western was the Cinema. The Embassy was on the west side of Western, just below 3rd Street. The Clinton was about midway between them, on the east side of the street. Those are the only theatres I remember on Western Avenue north of the Wiltern.
The Capri has been demolished as well, but it is entirely gone. The Valley Grand Building (minus its third floor towers and attic) still exists, including the former foyer of the Garfield which is now retail space, but the auditorium and stage tower of the theatre have been replaced by a parking lot.
At the L.A. Public Library’s regional history database, I’ve come across cards which refer to a “Glendale Theatre #1”(no address given, alas), and this theatre on Brand Boulevard is sometimes referred to as “Glendale Theatre #2”, so it’s possible that your photo is of that first Glendale Theatre. As this second Glendale Theatre was opened in 1920, someone who is familiar with the course of women’s fashion in the era might be able to tell from the way the women in this picture are dressed whether or not the photo dates from an earlier year.
The only descriptions of the theatre that I have are from people who were there in the 1970s. I never saw it myself. The people who operated the theatre in the 1970s believed it to be very old, the wooden seats being one indication of that. Central Avenue is a secondary commercial street parallel to, and two blocks west of, Brand Boulevard. Early in the city’s history, it was expected to be the main commercial street (thus the name) and Brand Boulevard was expected to be a broad, residential avenue.
The extension of the Pacific Electric interurban line along Brand Boulevard reversed the intended order. It is possible that the theatre dates from the silent era, but was closed for extended periods of time, due to its somewhat out-of-the-way location. It’s also possible that it was merely an older commercial building cheaply converted (perhaps with used seats) to a theatre sometime in the 1940s.
I can find nothing about the Dreamland Theatre in Long Beach, but the California Index of the Regional History section of the L.A. Public Library web site (mouse over “Library Resources” on the main page to find the Regional History link on the drop-down menu) has three brief references to the Fairyland Theatre.
It was located in the 200 block of East Seaside Boulevard, and existed as early as 1914 (date of the first reference, when the theatre was undergoing repairs.) The address then was 227 Seaside. The next reference, from 1920, says that the theatre had been purchased by a J.M. Donley, who intended to erect a new theatre on the site. The address at this time is given as 223 Seaside. A third reference, from 1924, again says that there are plans underway to erect a new theatre on the site, and that the manager of the theatre is a Chatham C. Donley. Here the address is given as 225 Seaside. The Tracy Theatre at 219 E. Seaside must have been a next-door neighbor of the Fairyland, though it’s also possible that the Tracy (AKA Ritz and Capitol), built in 1925, actually replaced the Fairyland.
Not much to go on, I know, but that part of Long Beach (around The Pike) went through a lot of changes over the years, and every trace of it is now gone, so it’s hard to track down information about it. Your Dreamland Theatre may have been one of a number of theatres on The Pike itself. If so, there’s a chance you might be able to find a picture of it on an old picture postcard. The Pike was a popular subject for postcards early in the century.
As you own the organ from the Fairyland, I would suggest that you re-post your question, and mention the organ in the subject line. Several members of Cinema Treasures are very knowledgeable about theatre organs, and they are more likely to read your post if it mentions the organ in the subject line. They might be able to give you more information than I can.
I believe that Patrick Crowley and Ross Melnick are both Americans.
I suspect that one of the main reasons that the photo feature has been unavailable for so long is that this is not a for-profit web site (you’ll notice that it carries no advertising, other than a few pages devoted to their own Cinema Treasures book, and that they don’t sell any member’s name and e-mail address to spammers), so neither of them can devote full time to running it, nor is there a budget for hiring someone who could.
I’m sure that the Add-a-photo feature will become available again eventually. In the meantime, if you have pictures to share, it’s possible to get free image hosting space at several web sites, such as Photobucket, Flickr, and Webshots (use Google to find any of them), and after posting the images to your chosen site, just put links to them in your comments here.
I went to the Encore a few times, between 1963-1966. Like the Oriental on Sunset Boulevard and the Clinton on Western Avenue, it was a place where you could sometimes catch foreign movies that had already made their way through the usual art house circuit. It was at the Encore that I first saw “Last Year at Marienbad.” The program included a second feature which I had already seen, but I was with friends who had never seen it, so while it was playing I went out to the lobby for a snack and got drawn into a conversation about “Marienbad” that was going on between a fellow I took to be the manager and another guy. It was an interesting debate they were having over the meaning and intent of the movie. I wonder if one of them was Louis Federici?
I always liked the Encore. It was a very pleasant and well-run theatre.
The large theatre next door to the World with the sign “Minneapolis Evangelical Auditorium” on the side and the name “Alvin Theatre” on its stage tower, was the 1910 Shubert Theatre, listed on Cinema Treasures under the name it received when remodeled and reopened as a road show house two years after this picture was taken, the Academy.
A 1955 view of the side wall and part or the facade of the Academy, when it was the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium, can be seen in the photograph of its former neighbor, the World Theatre at 16 N. 7th Street. The old “Alvin Theatre” sign can be clearly seen on the end wall of the Academy’s stage tower.
The architect of the 1949 remodel of the Roseville theatre was O.A. Deichmann of San Francisco, according to the January, 1949 issue of Architect & Engineer. The contractor was A.J. Hooper, also of San Francisco.
The recent renovation and conversion of the theatre for Magic Circle was designed by the firm of John Sergio Fisher & Associates, who were also the architects for the renovation of Magic Circle’s other Roseville theatre, the Tower.
The oldest reference to the Lyric Theatre I’ve seen is the announcement of the plans to build it which appeared in the January 3rd, 1925 issue of the Los Angeles Times. The L.A. Public Library’s photo database has an early picture of the Lyric, with the notation that it opened on October 22, no year given, but I think we can safely assume that it was 1925, as the Times of May 3rd, 1925 reported that the contract for construction had been let.
The Times of February 10th, 1971 lists the Lyric Theatre in the Independent Theatres section of their movie guide, so the successor company of Fox Theatres had dropped it by then.
ken mc:
The Fairfax is a different theatre, also still open, and operating as a multiplex, several blocks west of the New Beverly Cinema.
ken mc:
The Leimert Theatre building included shops along the street frontage. The dry cleaning establishment occupied part of that commercial space. The photograph is not dated, but looks to be from a few decades ago (the style of the signage looks about 1970s), so there’s a good chance that the cleaners is now gone, too.
After it closed as a theatre, for many years the Leimert was operated as a regional assembly hall by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They restored the theatre, the only major alteration being the replacement of the “Leimert” sign on the tower with a sign that said “Watchtower,” referring to their official organization, The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. I’m not sure if they still use the building or not, but I’m doubtful that it has been converted into a dry cleaning plant.
ken mc:
The pictures to which you linked above do not depict this Meralta Theatre on 1st Street in Los Angeles, but rather the Meralta Theatre in Culver City. There was a third Meralta Theatre, in Downey. All three of the theatres were originally owned by two sisters, Pearl Merrill and Laura Peralta of Culver City. The name of the theatres was derived from the combination of parts of their surnames.
stevebob:
A small picture on this page at Roadside Peek shows the giant cone sign which sits atop what they claim was once the Currie’s Ice Cream Parlor in Montebello. Does it look familiar? Currie’s had shops all over Los Angeles. I well remember their “Mile-High Cones.”
ken mc:
There is indeed some confusion. I’ve never seen this particular picture before, but there is no doubt that the New Broadway it pictures is not the Broadway Theatre near 4th Street. However, the theatre pictured is not between 6th and 7th Streets. It is north of 6th Street. In the background of this picture, you can see the Hotel Hayward, located on the southwest corner of 6th and Spring. Tally’s New Broadway must therefore have been located either on part the large lot where the Arcade Building was later built, or immediately south of it.
I guess this puts the early history of the Broadway Theatre at 428 Broadway back up in the air. Ken Roe’s information above about Tally’s Broadway Theatre at 833 S. Broadway is correct, however. But you are right about there being no Cinema Treasures entry for the New Broadway near 6th Street.
Also a bit odd: Tally’s Broadway was opened at the end of 1909, but this picture of the New Broadway is also dated 1909, which suggest that the New Broadway was at least as old as the Broadway. I wonder, then, why Tally called it New?
The Rosemary Theatre seen in the 1918 movie mentioned in the comment above was not the same building as the Fox Rosemary Theatre. The original Rosemary Theater was located at 6 Ocean Park Pier. It escaped destruction in a fire that swept the pier in 1915, but by 1921 a new Rosemary Theatre had been built, at 2946 Ocean Front Promenade. This newer theatre was itself lost in the fire which completely destroyed the pier in 1924, as well as the adjacent Dome Theatre. The event is described at this web page. The Fox Rosemary Theatre was built following that fire.
Incidentally, the second Rosemary Theatre was located across the Promenade from the site of an earlier theatre called the Wonderland, which was listed in a 1915 directory of Ocean Park as being at 2939 Ocean Front Promenade. I’ve found no later listings of the Wonderland Theatre, so it may have been gone before the second Rosemary was built. There was also another Rosemary Theatre located a mile or so south, on Ocean Front Walk in Venice. I have found listings for that theatre from 1927 to 1933. It was gone by 1936.
The address of the Dome Theatre as listed in telephone directories of the early ‘30s was 3014 Ocean Front Promenade.
An aerial view of the spectacular 1924 conflagration which destroyed both the original Dome theatre and the adjacent amusement piers can be seen at this page.
There are quite a few pictures of the Uptown at the theatre’s official web site.
You can download a free PDF file of the Uptown’s 80th anniversary calender, which features close-up pictures of a dozen of the theatre’s sculptured decorations, from the web site Friends of the Uptown. There’s also a good Links page at this site.
There is a fairly detailed history of the Uptown, with a few small pictures, on this page of Jazz Age Chicago.
The Chicago Uptown is well represented on the web. A Google search on Uptown Theatre Chicago will fetch many links.
I don’t know enough about the software you use to run this site to know if this would be of any use to you, but you might consider using Brad Fitzpatrick’s open-source memcached system to speed things up. I’ve been using LiveJournal, where memcached was first launched, for about four years, and the improvement in the site’s functionality was astonishing when memcached was adopted.
ken mc: I don’t know if this particular movie is available on DVD. There are a couple of DVD compilations of Lloyd’s movies available, but I don’t think that “Safety Last” is among those included. I’ve heard that a Harold Lloyd boxed set, with about a dozen features and many shorts, is due out in November, from New Line Home Video, and this movie may be included in that collection. I haven’t been able to find details about it, though.
The facade of this theater (which looks like an odd hybrid of Spanish Mission and Art Nouveau) may have been removed in 1933. The July 28th issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor of that year says that architect Clifford Balch was preparing plans for the remodeling of the Sunbeam Theater in Highland Park. I don’t know if this was an aborted attempt to renovate and re-open the theater (given that Balch was a well-known theater architect) or if the remodeling was for the conversion of the theatre into the offices for the newspaper.
The Park was gone by the time I became familiar with Highland Park, but Ivers' was still there in the mid-1980s.
If you go to the California Index at the L.A. Public Library’s web site, and search for theatre, Highland, and Park (one word in each of the three search boxes), you will get among the results a link to a PDF file which contains a scanned version of a Highland Park News-Herald article about the Park, published May 19th, 1963 within a week after the theatre’s closure. There is a picture of the theatre’s marquee, lettered to announce the remodeling of the building to become part of People’s Department Store.
The article gives the opening date as May 29th, 1936. The first program was a double feature of “These Three” and “The Return of Jimmy Valentine.” One of the stars of “We Three” was Joel McCrae, who had as a child lived in Highland Park, across Figuroa Street from Sycamore Grove Park.
Diana Ellis: The article also mentions that, in 1936, the Boy’s Market was located at at Avenue 55 and Monte Vista Street.
The only theatre I remember as being north of Santa Monica on Western was the Cinema. The Embassy was on the west side of Western, just below 3rd Street. The Clinton was about midway between them, on the east side of the street. Those are the only theatres I remember on Western Avenue north of the Wiltern.
OOPS again—– Valley “Drive” in the address section should also be changed to Valley “Boulevard.”
The Capri has been demolished as well, but it is entirely gone. The Valley Grand Building (minus its third floor towers and attic) still exists, including the former foyer of the Garfield which is now retail space, but the auditorium and stage tower of the theatre have been replaced by a parking lot.
At the L.A. Public Library’s regional history database, I’ve come across cards which refer to a “Glendale Theatre #1”(no address given, alas), and this theatre on Brand Boulevard is sometimes referred to as “Glendale Theatre #2”, so it’s possible that your photo is of that first Glendale Theatre. As this second Glendale Theatre was opened in 1920, someone who is familiar with the course of women’s fashion in the era might be able to tell from the way the women in this picture are dressed whether or not the photo dates from an earlier year.
The Los Angeles Public Library has two photographs of this theatre:
The Palace Grand, from about 1920.
Brand Boulevard about 1925, showing the theatre with the TD&L sign.
The only descriptions of the theatre that I have are from people who were there in the 1970s. I never saw it myself. The people who operated the theatre in the 1970s believed it to be very old, the wooden seats being one indication of that. Central Avenue is a secondary commercial street parallel to, and two blocks west of, Brand Boulevard. Early in the city’s history, it was expected to be the main commercial street (thus the name) and Brand Boulevard was expected to be a broad, residential avenue.
The extension of the Pacific Electric interurban line along Brand Boulevard reversed the intended order. It is possible that the theatre dates from the silent era, but was closed for extended periods of time, due to its somewhat out-of-the-way location. It’s also possible that it was merely an older commercial building cheaply converted (perhaps with used seats) to a theatre sometime in the 1940s.
I can find nothing about the Dreamland Theatre in Long Beach, but the California Index of the Regional History section of the L.A. Public Library web site (mouse over “Library Resources” on the main page to find the Regional History link on the drop-down menu) has three brief references to the Fairyland Theatre.
It was located in the 200 block of East Seaside Boulevard, and existed as early as 1914 (date of the first reference, when the theatre was undergoing repairs.) The address then was 227 Seaside. The next reference, from 1920, says that the theatre had been purchased by a J.M. Donley, who intended to erect a new theatre on the site. The address at this time is given as 223 Seaside. A third reference, from 1924, again says that there are plans underway to erect a new theatre on the site, and that the manager of the theatre is a Chatham C. Donley. Here the address is given as 225 Seaside. The Tracy Theatre at 219 E. Seaside must have been a next-door neighbor of the Fairyland, though it’s also possible that the Tracy (AKA Ritz and Capitol), built in 1925, actually replaced the Fairyland.
Not much to go on, I know, but that part of Long Beach (around The Pike) went through a lot of changes over the years, and every trace of it is now gone, so it’s hard to track down information about it. Your Dreamland Theatre may have been one of a number of theatres on The Pike itself. If so, there’s a chance you might be able to find a picture of it on an old picture postcard. The Pike was a popular subject for postcards early in the century.
As you own the organ from the Fairyland, I would suggest that you re-post your question, and mention the organ in the subject line. Several members of Cinema Treasures are very knowledgeable about theatre organs, and they are more likely to read your post if it mentions the organ in the subject line. They might be able to give you more information than I can.
I believe that Patrick Crowley and Ross Melnick are both Americans.
I suspect that one of the main reasons that the photo feature has been unavailable for so long is that this is not a for-profit web site (you’ll notice that it carries no advertising, other than a few pages devoted to their own Cinema Treasures book, and that they don’t sell any member’s name and e-mail address to spammers), so neither of them can devote full time to running it, nor is there a budget for hiring someone who could.
I’m sure that the Add-a-photo feature will become available again eventually. In the meantime, if you have pictures to share, it’s possible to get free image hosting space at several web sites, such as Photobucket, Flickr, and Webshots (use Google to find any of them), and after posting the images to your chosen site, just put links to them in your comments here.
So the Encore has not been demolished?
I went to the Encore a few times, between 1963-1966. Like the Oriental on Sunset Boulevard and the Clinton on Western Avenue, it was a place where you could sometimes catch foreign movies that had already made their way through the usual art house circuit. It was at the Encore that I first saw “Last Year at Marienbad.” The program included a second feature which I had already seen, but I was with friends who had never seen it, so while it was playing I went out to the lobby for a snack and got drawn into a conversation about “Marienbad” that was going on between a fellow I took to be the manager and another guy. It was an interesting debate they were having over the meaning and intent of the movie. I wonder if one of them was Louis Federici?
I always liked the Encore. It was a very pleasant and well-run theatre.
The large theatre next door to the World with the sign “Minneapolis Evangelical Auditorium” on the side and the name “Alvin Theatre” on its stage tower, was the 1910 Shubert Theatre, listed on Cinema Treasures under the name it received when remodeled and reopened as a road show house two years after this picture was taken, the Academy.
A 1955 view of the side wall and part or the facade of the Academy, when it was the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium, can be seen in the photograph of its former neighbor, the World Theatre at 16 N. 7th Street. The old “Alvin Theatre” sign can be clearly seen on the end wall of the Academy’s stage tower.
The architect of the 1949 remodel of the Roseville theatre was O.A. Deichmann of San Francisco, according to the January, 1949 issue of Architect & Engineer. The contractor was A.J. Hooper, also of San Francisco.
The recent renovation and conversion of the theatre for Magic Circle was designed by the firm of John Sergio Fisher & Associates, who were also the architects for the renovation of Magic Circle’s other Roseville theatre, the Tower.