Ken: The first three pictures to which you linked depict the interior of the Tracy Theatre on Seaside Avenue, which opened under the name Ritz in 1925. The 7th Street Ritz was a much smaller neighborhood theatre. I believe that the fourth picture to which you linked does show 7th Street Ritz, though.
No relation as far as I know, though the extended family was quite large, so there were a lot of Vogels around L.A. by the late 19th century who were fairly close relatives of my great grandfather. But then it’s also a fairly common surname, so there were also quite a few Vogels to whom I’d probably not be related. I don’t know if I’m related to the owners of the Vogel Block which stood at the southwest corner of 7th and Broadway until it was demolished to make way for Loew’s State Theatre, either.
Ken: The undated photo is a bit blurry, making the marquee difficult to read, but I think one of the movies being shown is “Confidential Agent”, with Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall. That dates the photo at no earlier than 1945— and its probably no later either, given the wartime crowds jamming the streetcar stop and the presence of only pre-war cars on the street.
In 1923, the Roosevelt was operating under the name Electric Theatre.
The theatre in the picture to which ken mc linked above is definitely the Roosevelt. Another photograph from the USC archive shows the intersection of Main and Market Streets in 1935. The marquee of the theatre can be recognized at the far left. The address of the U.S. Hotel at the corner of Main and Market is given as 170 N.Main, so the address of the theatre in the next block can be reasonably assumed to be 212 N Main.
Eventually, all the buildings in these photos were demolished as part of the expansion of the civic center. The site of the Roosevelt Theatre is now the location of the eastward extension of Temple Street which was built in 1960.
The Electric at 212 N. Main is listed at Cinema Treasures after all, under its later name, the Roosevelt. I actually knew that last year, when I posted something about it on the Optic Theatre page, but I’d completely forgotten about it.
LM- The entrance to the Hotchkiss Theatre shown in the photo of the Hellman Building is too close to the south end of the block to have an address as low as 334. It’s possible that the L.A. Library made a mistake and the three names did not belong to one theatre at different times but to two different but nearby or adjacent theatres.
The Library’s photo collection contains a picture (undated) of the interior of the Casino Theatre, and the auditorium looks too wide to fit behind the narrow facade of the Hotchkiss. (The building could have widened out at the back, of course.)
I guess the whole question is up in the air until somebody finds more detailed information from other sources.
OK, I’ve found a reference to Talley’s Electric Theatre of 1902, and it was at 262 South Main, so the Electric Theatre at 212 N. Main was a different place.
LM- You must be right, but there’s a surprise. The L.A. Library’s California Index contains a couple of cards which refer to a Hotchkiss Theatre, which was also called the Casino Theatre and the (second) Los Angeles Theatre. I know that the first Los Angeles Theatre was the Spring Street house which later became the Lyceum, but I’d thought the second Los Angeles Theatre was the big one still standing on Broadway. Apparently, that’s at least the third of the name.
The theatre next to the Hellman Building was apparently built 1903, opened as the Casino, and was designed by architect Abraham Edelman (announcement in the L.A. Times of 7/19/1903.) I don’t know if it ever ran movies under any of its names, or how long it survived.
Ken: That doesn’t look like Temple and Spring looked in 1936. For one thing, the ground is level, and by 1936 Temple and Spring was a block farther west (on the hillside) than it had been before city hall was built. I’m thinking it’s probably Temple and Main, and the theatre is on Main Street. My guess is that it’s a theatre once called The Electric, at 212 N. Main. I don’t think it’s listed on CT under any name, but it’s in a 1923 list of Main Street theatres running Paramount films which was posted by vokoban on the Optic Theatre page last December.
I wonder if this is Thomas Talley’s famous Electric Theatre, which I believe was indeed in the 200 block of Main Street, but I’d always thought it was the 200 South block?
Ken: Did you notice the theatre’s ad just above the Owl Cigar ad on the wall of the building a few doors north? It gives the address as 344 S. Spring. The other thing I can tell from the picture is that the theatre’s name ends in “ss”, which is clear on both the wall ad and on the sign above the theatre entrance, and partly visible in the rooftop sign. I can’t make out the rest of the name though.
Having seen this photo from the L.A. library collection, I’m now wondering if the Paris Theatre is not simply the old Hitching Post Theatre remodeled and renamed.
The Los Angeles Public Library says that this photograph is of an “unidentified theatre”, but the five aisles, the enclosed space where the balcony would normally be and the Egyptian decor clearly identify this as a rare early photo of the interior of Grauman’s Egyptian seen from behind the orchestra pit.
Here is a 1950 photograph showing the marquee of the Paris Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It is from the Los Angeles Public Library collection. It was taken at the time of the Academy Awards event hosted that year at the Pantages Theatre.
What I’d really like to see are some animated .GIF pictures of the neon marquee going through its routine. In fact, I’d like to see such pictures of a lot of theatres with neon marquees.
That’s excellent news. One of the theatres I often attended growing up was Edwards San Gabriel, later called Edwards Century, designed by Balch and Stanberry. It was a substantial building, and easily survived the earthquake of 1987 which destroyed two nearby theatres in Alhambra and badly damaged the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium. Unfortunately, the Century was later demolished to make way for a commercial development.
Balch and Stanberry’s theatres make very good candidates for restoration. Two that are now thriving venues in small San Joaquin Valley cities, for example, are the Hanford Fox and the Visalia Fox. (Visit their official web sites through the links on those Cinema Treasures pages.) I have no doubt that, restored and properly managed, the Miramar could be a valuable asset to San Clemente.
LM: Graham referred to an unincorporated area a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, lying roughly between Central Avenue on the west, the South Gate city limits on the east, the Watts district of Los Angeles on the south, and the unincorporated Florence district on the north. At times, the whole area has been referred to as Florence-Graham.
Graham was named for an employee of the Pacific Electric Railroad, which opened its Los Angeles-Long Beach line in 1902. The subdivision of Graham may have been a project of Henry Huntington’s own development company. I haven’t been able to track that down yet, though. The Graham P.E. station was located at Manchester Avenue, now called Firestone Boulevard.
My earliest map of the area dates from about 1950, and by that time there was no longer a Main Street in the Graham area. It’s likely that the name had been changed to avoid confusion with Main Street in Los Angeles, which ran about a mile west of Graham. I don’t know what the name of the street might have been changed to, though. It’s possible that it was an earlier name for a stretch of what is now Compton Avenue.
There are no longer any three-digit addresses on north-south streets in the area either. It now uses the L.A. City-County numbering system that starts at 1st and Main Streets downtown.
Tom: The PDF file to which I linked on the Bush Theatre page said that the name Florence was used for the northern part of the area as early as 1869, when it was used for the Nadeau Street station of the Los Angeles-San Pedro Railway.
The name Graham was originally applied to a station located at Manchester Avenue on the Pacific Electric’s L.A.-Long Beach route, which wasn’t built until decades later. The station and the frontage road along the railroad route were named for a P.E. railroad employee.
It seems likely that the Graham Theatre was, like the Kinema, located in that business district along Manchester east and west of the station. My memory of the area is very dim, but I believe Graham Avenue was almost entirely residential in the 1950’s, with a few short stretches of light industry.
Copy of an e-mail I sent to Julie Moran Alterio, author of the Journal News article:
[quote]Dear Ms. Alterio,
This is in regard to your Journal News article of July 23, 2006 headlined “AMC expands market for independent films.” The second paragraph contains the statement “…AMC Theatres, the company that invented the two-screen multiplex in 1963….” If AMC is making that claim, they are spreading misinformation. AMC might have opened the first purpose-built twin theatre, but by 1963 at least two theatres had long since received second screens and operated as twin cinemas.
The invention of the multiplex is most commonly mis-attributed to Nat Taylor, a Canadian who added a second auditorium to the Elgin Theatre in Ottawa as early as 1947. Taylor was later associated with the Cineplex corporation. However, there was at least one two-screen theatre that was in operation even earlier than the Elgin.
In 1941, James Edwards (founder of the Edwards Theatre Circuit, later Edwards Cinemas and now part of the Regal Entertainment Group) added a second auditorium to his 1920’s-vintage Alhambra Theatre in Alhambra, California. From 1941 until the 1950’s, the theatre operated as the Alhambra & Annex, which is how I remember it being advertised in the local newspaper, Copley Press’s Alhambra Post-Advocate. After a renovation, the second auditorium was given the name Gold Cinema, but it continued to share box office, lobby and other facilities with the Alhambra. In its final years, the complex was operated under the name Alhambra Twin Cinemas. It was demolished after being severely damaged by an earthquake in 1987, and replaced by a 10-screen Edwards cinema called the Atlantic Palace. Though the building is gone, the history of its operation as a twin theatre is documented in old newspaper articles and advertisements.
I know this is a very minor concern, but I like to correct this bit of misinformation whenever I come across it. There may have been twin cinemas even earlier than the Alhambra & Annex, but until one is discovered to have existed, credit for inventing the twin-screen multiplex should go to James Edwards, not to Nat Taylor, Cineplex, or AMC.
Joe Vogel[/quote]
Yeah, I know, I’m a bit nutty on the subject, but having grown up as a patron of the Alhambra (and being the guy who added the Alhambra Twin Cinemas to the Cinema Treasures database), I figure I’m entitled.
And by the way (speaking of obsessions): The Alhambra Twin’s successor theatre still needs its CT page updated to show the correct number of screens (10, not 14) and its correct name: Edwards Atlantic Palace 10. It’s been listed under the wrong name for more than three years now.
Ah, so the Florence district Kinema IS listed here. I checked the 2004 Urban Areas map for the theatre’s address at Microsoft’s Terraserver, and though the site is being fussy tonight and won’t give me a full image, it’s clear from what displays that the theatre building must be gone. It would have been on the west side of Compton just south of Firestone. The old buildings on that corner appear to have been demolished at some time in order to straighten out a jog in Compton as it crosses Firestone.
Tom: Apparently, the name Florence-Graham does refer to the district of Florence southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. I just came across this PDF file in the California Index, and though it says nothing about the theatres there, it does contain a paragraph confirming the early use of the hyphenated name for the area. That’s where you should expect to find your Kinema Theatre, if its building still exists.
Tom: I’m wondering about the name Florence-Graham, CA. The only Florence I know of in the state is the old unincorporated area sandwiched between south central L.A. and the cities of Huntington Park and South Gate. I’ve never seen the hyphenated name Florence-Graham before.
There were once theatres called the Kinema in downtown Los Angeles (later the Fox Criterion), Fresno and Long Beach. I’ve checked the L.A. library’s California Index and can’t find any other theatres with that name (the index is far from exhaustive, though.) The only theatre I know of in the Florence area was the Fox Florence Theatre, but the area developed early and certainly must have had other theatres.
Ken: The first three pictures to which you linked depict the interior of the Tracy Theatre on Seaside Avenue, which opened under the name Ritz in 1925. The 7th Street Ritz was a much smaller neighborhood theatre. I believe that the fourth picture to which you linked does show 7th Street Ritz, though.
No relation as far as I know, though the extended family was quite large, so there were a lot of Vogels around L.A. by the late 19th century who were fairly close relatives of my great grandfather. But then it’s also a fairly common surname, so there were also quite a few Vogels to whom I’d probably not be related. I don’t know if I’m related to the owners of the Vogel Block which stood at the southwest corner of 7th and Broadway until it was demolished to make way for Loew’s State Theatre, either.
Ken: The undated photo is a bit blurry, making the marquee difficult to read, but I think one of the movies being shown is “Confidential Agent”, with Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall. That dates the photo at no earlier than 1945— and its probably no later either, given the wartime crowds jamming the streetcar stop and the presence of only pre-war cars on the street.
The street address of 649 Broadway needs to be added above.
In 1923, the Roosevelt was operating under the name Electric Theatre.
The theatre in the picture to which ken mc linked above is definitely the Roosevelt. Another photograph from the USC archive shows the intersection of Main and Market Streets in 1935. The marquee of the theatre can be recognized at the far left. The address of the U.S. Hotel at the corner of Main and Market is given as 170 N.Main, so the address of the theatre in the next block can be reasonably assumed to be 212 N Main.
Eventually, all the buildings in these photos were demolished as part of the expansion of the civic center. The site of the Roosevelt Theatre is now the location of the eastward extension of Temple Street which was built in 1960.
The Electric at 212 N. Main is listed at Cinema Treasures after all, under its later name, the Roosevelt. I actually knew that last year, when I posted something about it on the Optic Theatre page, but I’d completely forgotten about it.
LM- The entrance to the Hotchkiss Theatre shown in the photo of the Hellman Building is too close to the south end of the block to have an address as low as 334. It’s possible that the L.A. Library made a mistake and the three names did not belong to one theatre at different times but to two different but nearby or adjacent theatres.
The Library’s photo collection contains a picture (undated) of the interior of the Casino Theatre, and the auditorium looks too wide to fit behind the narrow facade of the Hotchkiss. (The building could have widened out at the back, of course.)
I guess the whole question is up in the air until somebody finds more detailed information from other sources.
OK, I’ve found a reference to Talley’s Electric Theatre of 1902, and it was at 262 South Main, so the Electric Theatre at 212 N. Main was a different place.
Ken: The second of those two pictures also shows the big, blank wall of the then brand-new West Coast Theatre in the middle distance.
LM- You must be right, but there’s a surprise. The L.A. Library’s California Index contains a couple of cards which refer to a Hotchkiss Theatre, which was also called the Casino Theatre and the (second) Los Angeles Theatre. I know that the first Los Angeles Theatre was the Spring Street house which later became the Lyceum, but I’d thought the second Los Angeles Theatre was the big one still standing on Broadway. Apparently, that’s at least the third of the name.
The theatre next to the Hellman Building was apparently built 1903, opened as the Casino, and was designed by architect Abraham Edelman (announcement in the L.A. Times of 7/19/1903.) I don’t know if it ever ran movies under any of its names, or how long it survived.
Ken: That doesn’t look like Temple and Spring looked in 1936. For one thing, the ground is level, and by 1936 Temple and Spring was a block farther west (on the hillside) than it had been before city hall was built. I’m thinking it’s probably Temple and Main, and the theatre is on Main Street. My guess is that it’s a theatre once called The Electric, at 212 N. Main. I don’t think it’s listed on CT under any name, but it’s in a 1923 list of Main Street theatres running Paramount films which was posted by vokoban on the Optic Theatre page last December.
I wonder if this is Thomas Talley’s famous Electric Theatre, which I believe was indeed in the 200 block of Main Street, but I’d always thought it was the 200 South block?
Ken: Did you notice the theatre’s ad just above the Owl Cigar ad on the wall of the building a few doors north? It gives the address as 344 S. Spring. The other thing I can tell from the picture is that the theatre’s name ends in “ss”, which is clear on both the wall ad and on the sign above the theatre entrance, and partly visible in the rooftop sign. I can’t make out the rest of the name though.
Having seen this photo from the L.A. library collection, I’m now wondering if the Paris Theatre is not simply the old Hitching Post Theatre remodeled and renamed.
An early 1920’s photo of the interior of the Rialto, as it looked following William Woollett’s 1921 remodeling for Sid Grauman.
The Los Angeles Public Library says that this photograph is of an “unidentified theatre”, but the five aisles, the enclosed space where the balcony would normally be and the Egyptian decor clearly identify this as a rare early photo of the interior of Grauman’s Egyptian seen from behind the orchestra pit.
Here is a 1950 photograph showing the marquee of the Paris Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. It is from the Los Angeles Public Library collection. It was taken at the time of the Academy Awards event hosted that year at the Pantages Theatre.
Here is a contemporary picture of the Theatre Jewelry Center.
What I’d really like to see are some animated .GIF pictures of the neon marquee going through its routine. In fact, I’d like to see such pictures of a lot of theatres with neon marquees.
Raad,
That’s excellent news. One of the theatres I often attended growing up was Edwards San Gabriel, later called Edwards Century, designed by Balch and Stanberry. It was a substantial building, and easily survived the earthquake of 1987 which destroyed two nearby theatres in Alhambra and badly damaged the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium. Unfortunately, the Century was later demolished to make way for a commercial development.
Balch and Stanberry’s theatres make very good candidates for restoration. Two that are now thriving venues in small San Joaquin Valley cities, for example, are the Hanford Fox and the Visalia Fox. (Visit their official web sites through the links on those Cinema Treasures pages.) I have no doubt that, restored and properly managed, the Miramar could be a valuable asset to San Clemente.
LM: Graham referred to an unincorporated area a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, lying roughly between Central Avenue on the west, the South Gate city limits on the east, the Watts district of Los Angeles on the south, and the unincorporated Florence district on the north. At times, the whole area has been referred to as Florence-Graham.
Graham was named for an employee of the Pacific Electric Railroad, which opened its Los Angeles-Long Beach line in 1902. The subdivision of Graham may have been a project of Henry Huntington’s own development company. I haven’t been able to track that down yet, though. The Graham P.E. station was located at Manchester Avenue, now called Firestone Boulevard.
My earliest map of the area dates from about 1950, and by that time there was no longer a Main Street in the Graham area. It’s likely that the name had been changed to avoid confusion with Main Street in Los Angeles, which ran about a mile west of Graham. I don’t know what the name of the street might have been changed to, though. It’s possible that it was an earlier name for a stretch of what is now Compton Avenue.
There are no longer any three-digit addresses on north-south streets in the area either. It now uses the L.A. City-County numbering system that starts at 1st and Main Streets downtown.
Tom: The PDF file to which I linked on the Bush Theatre page said that the name Florence was used for the northern part of the area as early as 1869, when it was used for the Nadeau Street station of the Los Angeles-San Pedro Railway.
The name Graham was originally applied to a station located at Manchester Avenue on the Pacific Electric’s L.A.-Long Beach route, which wasn’t built until decades later. The station and the frontage road along the railroad route were named for a P.E. railroad employee.
It seems likely that the Graham Theatre was, like the Kinema, located in that business district along Manchester east and west of the station. My memory of the area is very dim, but I believe Graham Avenue was almost entirely residential in the 1950’s, with a few short stretches of light industry.
Copy of an e-mail I sent to Julie Moran Alterio, author of the Journal News article:
[quote]Dear Ms. Alterio,
This is in regard to your Journal News article of July 23, 2006 headlined “AMC expands market for independent films.” The second paragraph contains the statement “…AMC Theatres, the company that invented the two-screen multiplex in 1963….” If AMC is making that claim, they are spreading misinformation. AMC might have opened the first purpose-built twin theatre, but by 1963 at least two theatres had long since received second screens and operated as twin cinemas.
The invention of the multiplex is most commonly mis-attributed to Nat Taylor, a Canadian who added a second auditorium to the Elgin Theatre in Ottawa as early as 1947. Taylor was later associated with the Cineplex corporation. However, there was at least one two-screen theatre that was in operation even earlier than the Elgin.
In 1941, James Edwards (founder of the Edwards Theatre Circuit, later Edwards Cinemas and now part of the Regal Entertainment Group) added a second auditorium to his 1920’s-vintage Alhambra Theatre in Alhambra, California. From 1941 until the 1950’s, the theatre operated as the Alhambra & Annex, which is how I remember it being advertised in the local newspaper, Copley Press’s Alhambra Post-Advocate. After a renovation, the second auditorium was given the name Gold Cinema, but it continued to share box office, lobby and other facilities with the Alhambra. In its final years, the complex was operated under the name Alhambra Twin Cinemas. It was demolished after being severely damaged by an earthquake in 1987, and replaced by a 10-screen Edwards cinema called the Atlantic Palace. Though the building is gone, the history of its operation as a twin theatre is documented in old newspaper articles and advertisements.
I know this is a very minor concern, but I like to correct this bit of misinformation whenever I come across it. There may have been twin cinemas even earlier than the Alhambra & Annex, but until one is discovered to have existed, credit for inventing the twin-screen multiplex should go to James Edwards, not to Nat Taylor, Cineplex, or AMC.
Joe Vogel[/quote]
Yeah, I know, I’m a bit nutty on the subject, but having grown up as a patron of the Alhambra (and being the guy who added the Alhambra Twin Cinemas to the Cinema Treasures database), I figure I’m entitled.
And by the way (speaking of obsessions): The Alhambra Twin’s successor theatre still needs its CT page updated to show the correct number of screens (10, not 14) and its correct name: Edwards Atlantic Palace 10. It’s been listed under the wrong name for more than three years now.
Ah, so the Florence district Kinema IS listed here. I checked the 2004 Urban Areas map for the theatre’s address at Microsoft’s Terraserver, and though the site is being fussy tonight and won’t give me a full image, it’s clear from what displays that the theatre building must be gone. It would have been on the west side of Compton just south of Firestone. The old buildings on that corner appear to have been demolished at some time in order to straighten out a jog in Compton as it crosses Firestone.
Tom: Apparently, the name Florence-Graham does refer to the district of Florence southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. I just came across this PDF file in the California Index, and though it says nothing about the theatres there, it does contain a paragraph confirming the early use of the hyphenated name for the area. That’s where you should expect to find your Kinema Theatre, if its building still exists.
Tom: I’m wondering about the name Florence-Graham, CA. The only Florence I know of in the state is the old unincorporated area sandwiched between south central L.A. and the cities of Huntington Park and South Gate. I’ve never seen the hyphenated name Florence-Graham before.
There were once theatres called the Kinema in downtown Los Angeles (later the Fox Criterion), Fresno and Long Beach. I’ve checked the L.A. library’s California Index and can’t find any other theatres with that name (the index is far from exhaustive, though.) The only theatre I know of in the Florence area was the Fox Florence Theatre, but the area developed early and certainly must have had other theatres.