Los Angeles Theatre
- Architects
- S. Charles Lee Samuel Tilden Norton
- Year
- 1931
- Style
- Renaissance Revival
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
- Collection
- broadway’s movie palaces
The Los Angeles Theatre opened in January 1931 at 615 South Broadway, commissioned by Chicago film exhibitor H.L. Gumbiner, who also built the nearby Tower Theatre. Designed by S. Charles Lee with Samuel Tilden Norton, the 2,000-seat movie palace was built in under six months and became one of the most lavish theaters in the city, its opulent interior said to be modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
the building
The grand staircase. A grand central staircase dominates the lobby, topped by a crystal fountain and lined with gold brocade drapes, the centerpiece of a French Baroque interior built to rival a movie's own spectacle before the film ever started.
Speed-built ornament. In August 1930 the site was still an excavated hole; by January 1931 the theater held its grand opening. Lee hit that six-month schedule by having the elaborate plaster ornamentation fabricated off-site, then trucked in and assembled like a jigsaw puzzle.
More than a theater. Beyond the 2,000-seat auditorium, the building held a restaurant and a ballroom on its lower level, built as a full evening's entertainment venue rather than just a place to watch a film.
the style
The Los Angeles Theatre works in an opulent Renaissance Revival mode outside and a French Baroque one within, a combination aimed squarely at making moviegoing feel like a night at a European palace; the interior's model was reportedly the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
More on Renaissance Revivalthe architect
S. Charles Lee was a leading Los Angeles movie palace architect; here he worked alongside Samuel Tilden Norton to deliver an elaborate design on an unusually fast construction schedule.
significance
The theater is a National Register of Historic Places contributing property and a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
nearby
- Hubert-Thom McAn Building
- F. and W. Grand Silver Store Building
- Arcade Theatre
- James Oviatt Building
- Banks-Huntley Building
- A.G. Bartlett Building