Southwest Builder and Contractor of October 2nd, 1925 announced the plans for the Granada Theater at Ontario, designed by L.A. Smith. The owner of the new theater and office building was Dr. C.L. Emmons, and the theater was to be be leased to West Coast Junior Theaters. The estimated cost was $200,000.
There are mentions of Meyer and Holler’s plans for the Granada Theatre in Southwest Builder and Contractor as early as the issue of April 15th, 1921. The theater must have been open by 1924, as the Hollywood Citizen of March 11th, 1924 carries an article about the new air systems which had been installed in both the Granada and the Apollo, making them the best ventilated theaters in the city.
I remember passing by this theater. It was designed in the Churrigueresque style popularized by the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego in 1915. If I recall correctly, it is a two story building, with either offices or apartments on the second floor. Its location is on the very southern edge of the rather bohemian but little-known Mount Washington district of Los Angeles, an area of rugged hills and canyons filled with a remarkable variety of houses in styles that range from late Victorian to modern. It is not too far from the Heritage Square project, where a number of early Los Angeles houses have been restored and assembled into a sort of architectural museum. It also has good access to the Pasadena Freeway. This one might be a good candidate for some sort of restoration project if it came on the market.
The newspaper Hollywood Citizen, on January 14th, 1921, informed readers that West Coast Theaters had leased the Apollo.
I have been struck by the remarkable resemblance between the Apollo’s facade and that of the Cooper Building in the eastern Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, which contained a theater then called the Granada, which later became the Coronet, and then (c1964) the Capri, before it was demolished following an earthquake in 1971. Many Los Angeles commercial buildings of the era were similar, but the similarity between these two is remarkable enough that it seems as though they might have had the same architect.
There were two Dome Theaters at this location. The first was mentioned in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of 9/16/1921, on the occasion of the construction of a pier near the theater. Then the SB&C issue of 2/1/1924 tells that: “ Venice Improvement Company and West Coast Theaters… propose to expend immediately more than $1,000,000 for a 2000 seat theater to replace the Dome Theatre destroyed by the recent conflagration….”
The Los Angeles Times of 4/9/1924 ran an article about the new theater, saying “Work will be started tomorrow.” Then, an article in the Santa Monica Outlook of 6/30/1924 says “Thousands welcome new Dome Theater at Ocean Park.” That must be a record construction time. They were probably anxious to get the place open before the height of the summer season, and start making back that huge sum they spent on it.
There are also mentions of the Dome in SB&C issue 2/21/1936, saying that Clifford Balch had made plans for alterations to this theater.
Los Angeles is the correct location for this theater. No part of North Broadway is in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles. It runs from downtown, past Chinatown, skirts the eastern edge of Elysian Park, crosses the Los Angeles river, bends eastward and runs through the Lincoln Heights district of the city, ending at Mission Road, a few blocks south of that street’s intersection with Soto Street. If it actually ran northward, it would reach Highland Park, but it becomes and east-west street and heads instead toward the El Sereno district.
The Broadway Theatre in the 400 block was called Tally’s “New” Broadway, because he had an earlier Tally’s Broadway Theater in the 800 block. That theater was demolished in 1929, to make way for an expansion of the May Company Department Store.
The Linda Lea was opened as the Arrow Theater, at 251 S. Main Street. The architect was John Kunst, and the original owner was a Mr. George Carpenter. The plans were for a theater to seat 500 people, and two stores. This information is from the announcement of the completion of the plans in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 9/19/1924. The listing of the contracts for construction were published in SB&C issue of 10/17/1924.
This theater was listed for the first time in the Los Angeles City Directory of 1926, at 6107 S. Main Street. The Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 5/23/1924 makes this announcement about it: “Lawrence McConville… has completed plans and has the contract to construct a store and theater building at the corner of 61st and Main streets for J.A. Piuma; it will have seating for 800 people and there will be 2 stores… cost $35,000.”
The lively entertainment district which once thrived on Central Avenue was entirely gone by the 1970s. The neighborhood had grown very poor by then, and had been deserted even by the chain drug stores and markets. A few historic buildings remained, but the place was dispirited and dangerous. It’s probably best that you didn’t go exploring there at that time.
I know that some Los Angeles area neighborhood movie houses did close down for a while during the depression years, and were then re-opened as the economy recovered in the early 1940s, often renovated and given new names. It seems likely enough that the Circle was among them. (But then, so might the Aloha. Is it certain that it was built in the 1940s, or could it have been an older theater operated earlier under another name?) But it does look as though the Century is a more likely candidate for being the theater designed by Smith. Yet, that 1925 opening date for the Circle-without-address seems a bit late for a theater designed in 1921. It usually took less than a year to build and open a small neighborhood theater in those days.
(I don’t know why I appended “Fox” to West Coast in that first comment- it was still just West Coast in those days.)
Something that annoys me no end is the knowledge that, until I was about five or six years old, we frequently drove along that stretch of Broadway while on the way to visit various relatives who lived in the southern section of the city. Then we began using the new Harbor Freeway, and seldom traveled Broadway again. If that freeway had opened a few years later, I’d probably have a clear memory of the neighborhood with which I could connect some of these theater locations.
I notice that, directly under their listing of the Casino, the have a theater called the “Cirole.” I wonder if that could be a misspelling of “Circle?” There was definitely a Circle Theater in Los Angeles in that era, also designed by Smith, located at 60th and Moneta Avenue (later renamed South Broadway.)
And, on the subject of coincidence, before I got your reply here, I had minutes before made a comment about the Circle on the Cinema Treasures entry for the Aloha Theater, at 60th and Broadway, which may in fact have been the Circle.
As for the address coincidence on Central Avenue, many of the neighborhood theaters built in Los Angeles in that era were of a fairly standard form, with a couple of shops either side of the lobby entrance, and sometimes a door to an upper floor of offices or apartments. A great many theaters built at intersections thus had addresses ending in a number in the teens, so the odds of two theaters a block apart on the same side of a street having a number ending in 19 were probably one in five.
I came across a photograph, in the Los Angeles Public Library photo database, of a Palms Theater in Palms, California, c1928. It is possible that this theater dates from that era. The neighborhood is quite old. My grandfather was a plastering contractor in the 1920s, and many of his jobs were in the Palms-Cheviot Hills area. It was pretty fully built up there before 1930, and could easily have supported a movie house of its own in the prosperous years before the depression, even with other theaters nearby.
Here’s an interesting puzzle. In the issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor for 7/29/1921 there is a notice that L.A. Smith designed a theater to be built for Fox West Coast at 60th and Moneta Avenue (the former name of South Broadway.) The theater was named the Circle. It is described as a one story brick building, containing six shops and a theater to seat 900.
The question is, does this article refer to the Aloha, at 6010 Broadway, or to the now-demolished Century, across the street at 6013? If there were no theaters on the northern corners of that intersection, though, one or the other of these two had to be the work of L.A. Smith. Perhaps a reference can be found to one or the other under the earlier name, maybe in a Fox West Coast theater listing or some such.
In the L.A. Library’s online California Index, I have come across many references to theaters designed by L.A. Smith in the early-mid 1920s, but the index doesn’t always reveal their later names, and usually doesn’t give the exact street address. I’ve been trying to match them up with theaters listed here, and have succeeded with a few, but there are more that I haven’t been able to connect. I think that some of them aren’t listed here at all, especially those on the south side of town. I wish I could get ahold of the periodicals from which the information was taken themselves, instead of just these scans of library index cards.
But Smith was a remarkably prolific architect in those years. I have seen references to at least two dozen theaters he designed between 1920 and 1926. Significantly, there is a reference to a theater at 43rd and Central which he designed , originally called the Casino, owned by an investor named J.V. Akey, and leased to West Coast Theaters. (This information all comes from the June 17th, 1921 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor.) This has made me wonder if perhaps that is not a typo in the Film Daily Yearbooks from the 1950’s. It seems possible that whoever operated the Tivoli under the name Bill Robinson might have switched theaters, moving one block south sometime in the 1940s, and taken the name with them.
I remember the Bill Robinson being listed in the L.A. Times movie section well into the 1950s, at least, but unfortunately I was only ever familiar with the section of Central Avenue north of Washington Boulevard, so I have no memory of ever having seen this theater or others nearby, which were a mile or so south of Washington.
I remember that, in the early 1960s, this theater was quite well known for its ongoing concert series, Jazz at The Metro. I heard it mentioned on the local jazz radio station at the time, which I think was KBFK-FM, and it was frequently plugged in the entertainment section of The Los Angeles Times. I always intended to check it out, but never got around to it.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 3/15/1937 says that architect Clifford A. Balch had prepeared the plans for remodeling an existing building at 417-419 N. Fairfax for use as a movie theatre.
Southwest builder and contractor of 2/13/1925 says that Richard D. King was the architect for the Ravenna Theatre, and that it was being built for Chotiner Theaters.
I have found an additional reference to the Scenic Theater. Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 7/18/1919 says that architects A.R. Walker and P.A. Eisen had prepared the plans for the theater.
One night, sometime around 1963, I accompanied two adventurous friends to the Regent Theatre. It was a grind house, serving mostly as a place for drunks to get off the street, but one of the features on their triple bill that night was a very bad (as it turned out) movie of Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans” with George Peppard. The movie had flashed through the regular theaters so fast that we had missed it, and we wanted to see it badly enough to brave a skid row grind house.
My chief memory of the place is of worn floors, peeling paint, broken seats, a barrel-vaulted ceiling of astonishing dirtiness, loud sound and surprisingly bright light from bare bulbs (both of these features apparently intended to keep the drunks from getting too comfortable), and several patrons who talked to themselves. Oh, yeah- and the smell. I mean The SMELL! The theater was in bad, bad shape.
The saddest thing, though, was that the movie was even worse than the theater. What a stinker! But what the hell. I think it only cost us fifty cents each, and we got to say that we’d been to a movie on skid row. The Regent was the only Main Street movie house I’ve ever been in, and I cherish the memory. Thanks, Regent, and so long.
This theater has had four names: The Morosco, The President (in the 1930s), The Newsreel (in the 1940s, before that name was transfered to the Tower Theatre) and The Globe.
I have found that the Majestic opened on November 23rd, 1908. It was owned by M.A. Hamburger, owner of Hamburger’s Department Store, which was located just up the block at the corner of 8th and Broadway. The store later became the May Company.
Thomas Tally’s first Broadway Theater was located on the same block as the Majestic.
Southwest Builder and Contractor of October 2nd, 1925 announced the plans for the Granada Theater at Ontario, designed by L.A. Smith. The owner of the new theater and office building was Dr. C.L. Emmons, and the theater was to be be leased to West Coast Junior Theaters. The estimated cost was $200,000.
There are mentions of Meyer and Holler’s plans for the Granada Theatre in Southwest Builder and Contractor as early as the issue of April 15th, 1921. The theater must have been open by 1924, as the Hollywood Citizen of March 11th, 1924 carries an article about the new air systems which had been installed in both the Granada and the Apollo, making them the best ventilated theaters in the city.
I remember passing by this theater. It was designed in the Churrigueresque style popularized by the Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego in 1915. If I recall correctly, it is a two story building, with either offices or apartments on the second floor. Its location is on the very southern edge of the rather bohemian but little-known Mount Washington district of Los Angeles, an area of rugged hills and canyons filled with a remarkable variety of houses in styles that range from late Victorian to modern. It is not too far from the Heritage Square project, where a number of early Los Angeles houses have been restored and assembled into a sort of architectural museum. It also has good access to the Pasadena Freeway. This one might be a good candidate for some sort of restoration project if it came on the market.
The newspaper Hollywood Citizen, on January 14th, 1921, informed readers that West Coast Theaters had leased the Apollo.
I have been struck by the remarkable resemblance between the Apollo’s facade and that of the Cooper Building in the eastern Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, which contained a theater then called the Granada, which later became the Coronet, and then (c1964) the Capri, before it was demolished following an earthquake in 1971. Many Los Angeles commercial buildings of the era were similar, but the similarity between these two is remarkable enough that it seems as though they might have had the same architect.
There were two Dome Theaters at this location. The first was mentioned in Southwest Builder and Contractor, issue of 9/16/1921, on the occasion of the construction of a pier near the theater. Then the SB&C issue of 2/1/1924 tells that: “ Venice Improvement Company and West Coast Theaters… propose to expend immediately more than $1,000,000 for a 2000 seat theater to replace the Dome Theatre destroyed by the recent conflagration….”
The Los Angeles Times of 4/9/1924 ran an article about the new theater, saying “Work will be started tomorrow.” Then, an article in the Santa Monica Outlook of 6/30/1924 says “Thousands welcome new Dome Theater at Ocean Park.” That must be a record construction time. They were probably anxious to get the place open before the height of the summer season, and start making back that huge sum they spent on it.
There are also mentions of the Dome in SB&C issue 2/21/1936, saying that Clifford Balch had made plans for alterations to this theater.
Los Angeles is the correct location for this theater. No part of North Broadway is in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles. It runs from downtown, past Chinatown, skirts the eastern edge of Elysian Park, crosses the Los Angeles river, bends eastward and runs through the Lincoln Heights district of the city, ending at Mission Road, a few blocks south of that street’s intersection with Soto Street. If it actually ran northward, it would reach Highland Park, but it becomes and east-west street and heads instead toward the El Sereno district.
The Broadway Theatre in the 400 block was called Tally’s “New” Broadway, because he had an earlier Tally’s Broadway Theater in the 800 block. That theater was demolished in 1929, to make way for an expansion of the May Company Department Store.
The Linda Lea was opened as the Arrow Theater, at 251 S. Main Street. The architect was John Kunst, and the original owner was a Mr. George Carpenter. The plans were for a theater to seat 500 people, and two stores. This information is from the announcement of the completion of the plans in Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 9/19/1924. The listing of the contracts for construction were published in SB&C issue of 10/17/1924.
This theater was listed for the first time in the Los Angeles City Directory of 1926, at 6107 S. Main Street. The Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 5/23/1924 makes this announcement about it: “Lawrence McConville… has completed plans and has the contract to construct a store and theater building at the corner of 61st and Main streets for J.A. Piuma; it will have seating for 800 people and there will be 2 stores… cost $35,000.”
The lively entertainment district which once thrived on Central Avenue was entirely gone by the 1970s. The neighborhood had grown very poor by then, and had been deserted even by the chain drug stores and markets. A few historic buildings remained, but the place was dispirited and dangerous. It’s probably best that you didn’t go exploring there at that time.
I know that some Los Angeles area neighborhood movie houses did close down for a while during the depression years, and were then re-opened as the economy recovered in the early 1940s, often renovated and given new names. It seems likely enough that the Circle was among them. (But then, so might the Aloha. Is it certain that it was built in the 1940s, or could it have been an older theater operated earlier under another name?) But it does look as though the Century is a more likely candidate for being the theater designed by Smith. Yet, that 1925 opening date for the Circle-without-address seems a bit late for a theater designed in 1921. It usually took less than a year to build and open a small neighborhood theater in those days.
(I don’t know why I appended “Fox” to West Coast in that first comment- it was still just West Coast in those days.)
Something that annoys me no end is the knowledge that, until I was about five or six years old, we frequently drove along that stretch of Broadway while on the way to visit various relatives who lived in the southern section of the city. Then we began using the new Harbor Freeway, and seldom traveled Broadway again. If that freeway had opened a few years later, I’d probably have a clear memory of the neighborhood with which I could connect some of these theater locations.
I notice that, directly under their listing of the Casino, the have a theater called the “Cirole.” I wonder if that could be a misspelling of “Circle?” There was definitely a Circle Theater in Los Angeles in that era, also designed by Smith, located at 60th and Moneta Avenue (later renamed South Broadway.)
And, on the subject of coincidence, before I got your reply here, I had minutes before made a comment about the Circle on the Cinema Treasures entry for the Aloha Theater, at 60th and Broadway, which may in fact have been the Circle.
As for the address coincidence on Central Avenue, many of the neighborhood theaters built in Los Angeles in that era were of a fairly standard form, with a couple of shops either side of the lobby entrance, and sometimes a door to an upper floor of offices or apartments. A great many theaters built at intersections thus had addresses ending in a number in the teens, so the odds of two theaters a block apart on the same side of a street having a number ending in 19 were probably one in five.
I came across a photograph, in the Los Angeles Public Library photo database, of a Palms Theater in Palms, California, c1928. It is possible that this theater dates from that era. The neighborhood is quite old. My grandfather was a plastering contractor in the 1920s, and many of his jobs were in the Palms-Cheviot Hills area. It was pretty fully built up there before 1930, and could easily have supported a movie house of its own in the prosperous years before the depression, even with other theaters nearby.
Here’s an interesting puzzle. In the issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor for 7/29/1921 there is a notice that L.A. Smith designed a theater to be built for Fox West Coast at 60th and Moneta Avenue (the former name of South Broadway.) The theater was named the Circle. It is described as a one story brick building, containing six shops and a theater to seat 900.
The question is, does this article refer to the Aloha, at 6010 Broadway, or to the now-demolished Century, across the street at 6013? If there were no theaters on the northern corners of that intersection, though, one or the other of these two had to be the work of L.A. Smith. Perhaps a reference can be found to one or the other under the earlier name, maybe in a Fox West Coast theater listing or some such.
In the L.A. Library’s online California Index, I have come across many references to theaters designed by L.A. Smith in the early-mid 1920s, but the index doesn’t always reveal their later names, and usually doesn’t give the exact street address. I’ve been trying to match them up with theaters listed here, and have succeeded with a few, but there are more that I haven’t been able to connect. I think that some of them aren’t listed here at all, especially those on the south side of town. I wish I could get ahold of the periodicals from which the information was taken themselves, instead of just these scans of library index cards.
But Smith was a remarkably prolific architect in those years. I have seen references to at least two dozen theaters he designed between 1920 and 1926. Significantly, there is a reference to a theater at 43rd and Central which he designed , originally called the Casino, owned by an investor named J.V. Akey, and leased to West Coast Theaters. (This information all comes from the June 17th, 1921 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor.) This has made me wonder if perhaps that is not a typo in the Film Daily Yearbooks from the 1950’s. It seems possible that whoever operated the Tivoli under the name Bill Robinson might have switched theaters, moving one block south sometime in the 1940s, and taken the name with them.
I remember the Bill Robinson being listed in the L.A. Times movie section well into the 1950s, at least, but unfortunately I was only ever familiar with the section of Central Avenue north of Washington Boulevard, so I have no memory of ever having seen this theater or others nearby, which were a mile or so south of Washington.
I remember that, in the early 1960s, this theater was quite well known for its ongoing concert series, Jazz at The Metro. I heard it mentioned on the local jazz radio station at the time, which I think was KBFK-FM, and it was frequently plugged in the entertainment section of The Los Angeles Times. I always intended to check it out, but never got around to it.
This theater was earlier known as the La Mirada.
Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 3/15/1937 says that architect Clifford A. Balch had prepeared the plans for remodeling an existing building at 417-419 N. Fairfax for use as a movie theatre.
The Madrid opened in October, 1926. That’s all I’ve been able to find out about it so far.
Southwest builder and contractor of 2/13/1925 says that Richard D. King was the architect for the Ravenna Theatre, and that it was being built for Chotiner Theaters.
I have found an additional reference to the Scenic Theater. Southwest Builder and Contractor issue of 7/18/1919 says that architects A.R. Walker and P.A. Eisen had prepared the plans for the theater.
The Mesa was closed in September of 1963. A fire damaged the building in April of 1964, and it was demolished in 1965.
One night, sometime around 1963, I accompanied two adventurous friends to the Regent Theatre. It was a grind house, serving mostly as a place for drunks to get off the street, but one of the features on their triple bill that night was a very bad (as it turned out) movie of Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans” with George Peppard. The movie had flashed through the regular theaters so fast that we had missed it, and we wanted to see it badly enough to brave a skid row grind house.
My chief memory of the place is of worn floors, peeling paint, broken seats, a barrel-vaulted ceiling of astonishing dirtiness, loud sound and surprisingly bright light from bare bulbs (both of these features apparently intended to keep the drunks from getting too comfortable), and several patrons who talked to themselves. Oh, yeah- and the smell. I mean The SMELL! The theater was in bad, bad shape.
The saddest thing, though, was that the movie was even worse than the theater. What a stinker! But what the hell. I think it only cost us fifty cents each, and we got to say that we’d been to a movie on skid row. The Regent was the only Main Street movie house I’ve ever been in, and I cherish the memory. Thanks, Regent, and so long.
This theater has had four names: The Morosco, The President (in the 1930s), The Newsreel (in the 1940s, before that name was transfered to the Tower Theatre) and The Globe.
I have found that the Majestic opened on November 23rd, 1908. It was owned by M.A. Hamburger, owner of Hamburger’s Department Store, which was located just up the block at the corner of 8th and Broadway. The store later became the May Company.
Thomas Tally’s first Broadway Theater was located on the same block as the Majestic.