Arcade Theatre
- Architect
- Morgan, Walls & Clements
- Year
- 1911
- Style
- Beaux-Arts
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
- Collection
- broadway’s movie palaces
The Arcade Theatre began in 1910 as a vaudeville house commissioned by real estate developer William May Garland and run by Alexander Pantages on Broadway's emerging theater row. Morgan, Walls & Clements designed the seven-story Beaux-Arts building, with office space filling the floors above the auditorium. After Pantages moved out in 1920, the theater cycled through names — Dalton's Broadway, then the Arcade in 1924, tied to the neighboring Broadway-Spring Arcade building — before closing as a grindhouse operated by Metropolitan Theatres in 1992.
the building
A theater with an office tower. The seven-story building paired a ground-floor auditorium with rentable office space above, letting Garland's theater investment double as a commercial office building.
From Pantages to grindhouse. Alexander Pantages ran the theater until 1920, after which it passed through names and operators — Dalton's Broadway, then the Arcade — before Metropolitan Theatres closed it as a grindhouse in 1992.
the style
Morgan, Walls & Clements designed the theater in the Beaux-Arts style, giving an early Broadway vaudeville and movie house the same formal, classically derived vocabulary used on the district's grander commercial buildings.
More on Beaux-Artsthe architect
Morgan, Walls & Clements was a Los Angeles architectural firm active in the early twentieth century; the Arcade Theatre was among its early Broadway district commissions.
significance
The city of Los Angeles designated the Arcade Theatre a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1991, a year before it closed as a grindhouse in 1992.
nearby
- F. and W. Grand Silver Store Building
- Hubert-Thom McAn Building
- Los Angeles Theatre
- Security Building
- Title Guarantee and Trust Company Building
- Hotel Rosslyn Annex