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.
I only ever saw the Hawaii a couple of times while it was still open, and regret never having had the chance to go a movie there. I had heard about it many years before I ever began to go to Hollywood, when I was only five or six years old. My older sister had been allowed to go to the Hawaii, with the family of one of her school friends. She described the waterfall and other atmospheric effects, and the general splendor of the theatre, unlike anything in our dull suburban neighborhood, and I was very envious. That she had gotten to see a Disney movie that I much desired to see became almost incidental, so lavish was the theatre I imagined from her description.
I wonder if the place has been much changed by the Salvation Army? I can’t really imagine them maintaining the waterfall and volcano effects, despite their respective potential to serve as metaphors for baptism and the fires of Hell. I don’t think that the Salvation Army is quite that theatrical an institution.
I would not have thought that the Optic was this large, given the look of it from the outside. It had a very small frontage, tiny ticket foyer, and virtually no marquee- just a neon sign with the theatre’s name. By the time I recall first seeing it, about 1960, it was an adult theatre, catering mostly to servicemen on leave and the unsavory characters of L.A.’s nearby skid row, who came to see what the posters out front called “Nudie Cuties.” I never went there, and I am surprised to find that a 700 seat auditorium was lurking behind that diminutive facade.
I just took a look at the recent aerial view of the block at Terraserver, and I can see that they have cut a new alley from Colorado Boulevard back into the block. There used to be only the one alley opening onto Colorado, right next to the theatre building. It also looks as though some of the buildings along Fair Oaks have been demolished and replaced with newer construction. I think it was part of the developer’s original plans to do this with much of the block, saving only the old fronts of the existing buildings. Many of them were small, and would have cost a fortune to retrofit for earthquake safety, and the space inside them would not have been very flexible.
I hope to get back to Pasadena some day. From what I’ve been able to piece together from web sites, the aerial photos at Terraserver, and a few first hand reports of what has been done in recent years, the changes are radical and extensive. I’d really like to take a look at it myself. I’d especially like to see the inside of the Fox, to see if there is anything at all recognizable about what remains of it.
A parking lot seems an incredibly low-end use for prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate, especially when it’s been no more than that for almost twenty years. But, given what Rolex charges for its watches, I guess they can afford the extravagance. Still, it seems to me that even had the main floor of the theatre been turned into retail space, as was the Beverly Theatre, it would have been a more economical use of the place.
I don’t remember Beverly Hills having a Civic Auditorium of any sort (or do they use the auditorium at the high school?) I would have thought that they would have been glad to spend a bit ( and take one small lot off the tax roles) to catch up with cities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Glendale, which have had such facilities for decades. I doubt that it would have cost very much to convert the Warner to public use. The building appeared to have been well maintained through the years. When even the small city of San Gabriel has managed to operate a 1500 seat municipal auditorium for ages now, (and San Gabriel probably doesn’t have even a tenth of the wealth that is concentrated in Beverly Hills), it really is a shame that they didn’t make the effort to save at least this one theatre, which could have provided so much benefit to the city.
The last time I was in the neighborhood was 1986, so I don’t know anything about the changes since then, other than what I’ve been told about, or have seen at the Old Town web site. But in 1986, almost every building on the block from Fair Oaks to DeLacy and from Colorado to Union was empty, and had been for many years. The area north of Union had already been demolished to make way for the big parking garage of Parsons Engineering Company.
Most of the block had by that time been bought up by a single developer, who may be the same one who eventually did the renovations, I don’t know. But when I first began to frequent the area, about 1960, it was fairly run down but still lively. The Fox had closed only a few years before, and had become the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, which also occupied the retail store on the corner of DeLacy. There was a fire door between the theater lobby and the corner store, and that was kept open all the time. The theater was still recognizable as such, though openings had been cut in the wall between lobby and auditorium, at about window height. The balcony was still there, but the stairs were roped off. The stage and proscenium were still there, too.
The rest of the block along Colorado had a number of thrift shops, a well-known used book store called Broughton’s, which was right across the alley from the theater, a large barber college, a couple of other shops I can’t recall details of, and, on the corner of Fair Oaks, in what had once been an Owl Rexall Drug Store, there was a low-priced lunchroom which seemed to change owners and names every couple of years. The best incarnation of the place was called The Family Barbecue Pit, owned and operated by a local African-American family. It was the best barbecue place in the San Gabriel Valley. The upper floors of the buildings along the block were either offices or apartments, and most of them appeared to still be occupied, even into the early 1970s.
Going up Fair Oaks, there were more thrift shops, a barber shop, a dive bar, and on the corner of Union, an unclaimed freight outlet, crammed from floor to ceiling with old trunks, suitcases, and shipping crates of all shapes and sizes. I think there was an old hotel above one of the buildings- the one with the bar in it, I believe.
I don’t have as detailed a memory of the Union Street side of the block, but I think it was mostly small workshops and warehouses, and maybe an automobile repair garage. Few of the buildings along either side of that block of Union Street had been built for retail uses. They were mostly one story brick buildings. I don’t remember any parking lot there at all in the 1960s.
The interior of the block did have real alleys in it. I was only in the one alongside the theater and the one behind Colorado Boulevard, once, when I was helping a friend load some boxes of books he had bought at Broughton’s into his car. As I recall, it was fairly tight back there, but I think that at least one of the buildings on the Union Street side must not have gone all the way back to the alley, because I remember being able to see the side wall of the theater’s stage house unobstructed.
I don’t know exactly where the plaza and the Laemmle building are, but I know that the block was solidly built up in those days, mostly with two story buildings except on the Union Street side. The last time I saw it was, of course, before the Whittier Narrows earthquake, which I know did some serious damage to many buildings in the area, so I can easily imagine some of the old buildings along Union Street being knocked down by it. I’m sure they were all unreinforced brick, and had wooden truss roofs, and few interior walls, or none at all in some cases. That particular type of building is pretty weak in an earthquake. If they were knocked down, their brick might have been used in the new construction, helping any new buildings to blend in with the others. But I don’t know for sure.
I am thinking now that, given the original name of the theatre, and the look of the original facade, the archtectural style of the State must have been that particular subset of Italian Renaissance called Florentine.
Shouldn’t this theatre be listed as being in North Hollywood rather than just the general area San Fernando Valley? Or maybe all the theatres in places like North Hollywood, Reseda, Chatsworth, Van Nuys, etc, should be listed together as being in the San Fernando Valley? It ought to be one or the other, though, just to keep things consistent.
Somewhere around my house I have a copy of a magazine from about 1930, called Creative Art. It is an issue devoted to architecture and planning in New York City, and it contains sketches of early proposals for the Rockefeller Center site. At least one sketch does feature a new house for the Metropolitan Opera as the centerpiece of the design.
In another proposal, there would have been a 100' wide avenue opened about midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, to have run from 42nd Street to Central Park. The new opera house would have fronted on this thoroughfare. Hardly any of the proposals featured in the magazine ever got built. Instead, there was Robert Moses.
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.
I only ever saw the Hawaii a couple of times while it was still open, and regret never having had the chance to go a movie there. I had heard about it many years before I ever began to go to Hollywood, when I was only five or six years old. My older sister had been allowed to go to the Hawaii, with the family of one of her school friends. She described the waterfall and other atmospheric effects, and the general splendor of the theatre, unlike anything in our dull suburban neighborhood, and I was very envious. That she had gotten to see a Disney movie that I much desired to see became almost incidental, so lavish was the theatre I imagined from her description.
I wonder if the place has been much changed by the Salvation Army? I can’t really imagine them maintaining the waterfall and volcano effects, despite their respective potential to serve as metaphors for baptism and the fires of Hell. I don’t think that the Salvation Army is quite that theatrical an institution.
I would not have thought that the Optic was this large, given the look of it from the outside. It had a very small frontage, tiny ticket foyer, and virtually no marquee- just a neon sign with the theatre’s name. By the time I recall first seeing it, about 1960, it was an adult theatre, catering mostly to servicemen on leave and the unsavory characters of L.A.’s nearby skid row, who came to see what the posters out front called “Nudie Cuties.” I never went there, and I am surprised to find that a 700 seat auditorium was lurking behind that diminutive facade.
I just took a look at the recent aerial view of the block at Terraserver, and I can see that they have cut a new alley from Colorado Boulevard back into the block. There used to be only the one alley opening onto Colorado, right next to the theatre building. It also looks as though some of the buildings along Fair Oaks have been demolished and replaced with newer construction. I think it was part of the developer’s original plans to do this with much of the block, saving only the old fronts of the existing buildings. Many of them were small, and would have cost a fortune to retrofit for earthquake safety, and the space inside them would not have been very flexible.
I hope to get back to Pasadena some day. From what I’ve been able to piece together from web sites, the aerial photos at Terraserver, and a few first hand reports of what has been done in recent years, the changes are radical and extensive. I’d really like to take a look at it myself. I’d especially like to see the inside of the Fox, to see if there is anything at all recognizable about what remains of it.
A parking lot seems an incredibly low-end use for prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate, especially when it’s been no more than that for almost twenty years. But, given what Rolex charges for its watches, I guess they can afford the extravagance. Still, it seems to me that even had the main floor of the theatre been turned into retail space, as was the Beverly Theatre, it would have been a more economical use of the place.
I don’t remember Beverly Hills having a Civic Auditorium of any sort (or do they use the auditorium at the high school?) I would have thought that they would have been glad to spend a bit ( and take one small lot off the tax roles) to catch up with cities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Glendale, which have had such facilities for decades. I doubt that it would have cost very much to convert the Warner to public use. The building appeared to have been well maintained through the years. When even the small city of San Gabriel has managed to operate a 1500 seat municipal auditorium for ages now, (and San Gabriel probably doesn’t have even a tenth of the wealth that is concentrated in Beverly Hills), it really is a shame that they didn’t make the effort to save at least this one theatre, which could have provided so much benefit to the city.
EJ:
The last time I was in the neighborhood was 1986, so I don’t know anything about the changes since then, other than what I’ve been told about, or have seen at the Old Town web site. But in 1986, almost every building on the block from Fair Oaks to DeLacy and from Colorado to Union was empty, and had been for many years. The area north of Union had already been demolished to make way for the big parking garage of Parsons Engineering Company.
Most of the block had by that time been bought up by a single developer, who may be the same one who eventually did the renovations, I don’t know. But when I first began to frequent the area, about 1960, it was fairly run down but still lively. The Fox had closed only a few years before, and had become the Salvation Army Thrift Shop, which also occupied the retail store on the corner of DeLacy. There was a fire door between the theater lobby and the corner store, and that was kept open all the time. The theater was still recognizable as such, though openings had been cut in the wall between lobby and auditorium, at about window height. The balcony was still there, but the stairs were roped off. The stage and proscenium were still there, too.
The rest of the block along Colorado had a number of thrift shops, a well-known used book store called Broughton’s, which was right across the alley from the theater, a large barber college, a couple of other shops I can’t recall details of, and, on the corner of Fair Oaks, in what had once been an Owl Rexall Drug Store, there was a low-priced lunchroom which seemed to change owners and names every couple of years. The best incarnation of the place was called The Family Barbecue Pit, owned and operated by a local African-American family. It was the best barbecue place in the San Gabriel Valley. The upper floors of the buildings along the block were either offices or apartments, and most of them appeared to still be occupied, even into the early 1970s.
Going up Fair Oaks, there were more thrift shops, a barber shop, a dive bar, and on the corner of Union, an unclaimed freight outlet, crammed from floor to ceiling with old trunks, suitcases, and shipping crates of all shapes and sizes. I think there was an old hotel above one of the buildings- the one with the bar in it, I believe.
I don’t have as detailed a memory of the Union Street side of the block, but I think it was mostly small workshops and warehouses, and maybe an automobile repair garage. Few of the buildings along either side of that block of Union Street had been built for retail uses. They were mostly one story brick buildings. I don’t remember any parking lot there at all in the 1960s.
The interior of the block did have real alleys in it. I was only in the one alongside the theater and the one behind Colorado Boulevard, once, when I was helping a friend load some boxes of books he had bought at Broughton’s into his car. As I recall, it was fairly tight back there, but I think that at least one of the buildings on the Union Street side must not have gone all the way back to the alley, because I remember being able to see the side wall of the theater’s stage house unobstructed.
I don’t know exactly where the plaza and the Laemmle building are, but I know that the block was solidly built up in those days, mostly with two story buildings except on the Union Street side. The last time I saw it was, of course, before the Whittier Narrows earthquake, which I know did some serious damage to many buildings in the area, so I can easily imagine some of the old buildings along Union Street being knocked down by it. I’m sure they were all unreinforced brick, and had wooden truss roofs, and few interior walls, or none at all in some cases. That particular type of building is pretty weak in an earthquake. If they were knocked down, their brick might have been used in the new construction, helping any new buildings to blend in with the others. But I don’t know for sure.
I am thinking now that, given the original name of the theatre, and the look of the original facade, the archtectural style of the State must have been that particular subset of Italian Renaissance called Florentine.
Shouldn’t this theatre be listed as being in North Hollywood rather than just the general area San Fernando Valley? Or maybe all the theatres in places like North Hollywood, Reseda, Chatsworth, Van Nuys, etc, should be listed together as being in the San Fernando Valley? It ought to be one or the other, though, just to keep things consistent.
Somewhere around my house I have a copy of a magazine from about 1930, called Creative Art. It is an issue devoted to architecture and planning in New York City, and it contains sketches of early proposals for the Rockefeller Center site. At least one sketch does feature a new house for the Metropolitan Opera as the centerpiece of the design.
In another proposal, there would have been a 100' wide avenue opened about midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, to have run from 42nd Street to Central Park. The new opera house would have fronted on this thoroughfare. Hardly any of the proposals featured in the magazine ever got built. Instead, there was Robert Moses.
Heh. I should have known! I think I might have dated one of them!