Encore? : Group Wants to Save Broadway’s Tattered Theaters

Broadway’s venerable Tower Theater, built in 1927 as one of the first movie palaces ever to play talkies, has been shut for two years, and all its seats have been removed. The Globe Theater, built as a drama house in 1913, has been converted for use as a swap meet. The Mayan, where Bill (Bojangles) Robinson once topped the bill, shows X-rated movies with titles like “Stephanie’s Lust Story.”

If the members of the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation have their way, all that will change. The foundation is holding a symposium today and Saturday to plot a curtain call for Los Angeles’s once-fabled Broadway theater district.

Ambitious Goal

The goal is to renovate tattered theaters along the street and put them back to use as performance venues, with “everything from Broadway shows to Vegas-type entertainment to rock ‘n’ roll singers,” according to foundation President Hillsman Wright.

Wright said the symposium is intended to win the attention and support of government and business leaders for the idea. The foundation, a nonprofit group started less than a year ago, hopes to begin a dialogue on how to renew the theater district before more theaters are lost.

Wright warns that time is running short: the largest movie houses, seating 3,000 people or more, have already been torn down, and many of the remaining buildings would be difficult to refurbish.

“Some plan needs to be in place to prevent them from being destroyed,” said Wright, a free-lance film publicist who has managed historic movie theaters in New York and Washington. “With each theater you lose, you lose part of the density that makes the whole thing make sense.”

But Bruce Corwin, president of Metropolitan Theaters Corp., which operates 10 theaters on or near Broadway, said the plan is “light-years away” from realization. “I share the dream, but I have serious questions about the many steps to get there,” he said. Corwin said that parking and theater goers are both in short supply downtown. Most of all, he said, the project is “going to require huge amounts of money. If it’s going to happen at all, it’s going to have to involve not only the private sector but also the public sector as well.”

Public sector money for the project may be difficult to find. John Tuite, administrator of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, said his office “would not have sufficient funds to accomplish the very ambitious plans of the foundation,” although it will continue to spend millions of dollars in the area.

Tuite said the agency plans to spend $12.7 million over the next several years in the area bordered by Hill and Los Angeles streets between 1st and 9th streets, which includes most of the Broadway theater district. “We’re aiming over the next 10 years to revitalize the whole historic district,” he said.

CRA plans call for more parking, low-interest loans and grants to property owners, increased safety measures, minibus service and other improvements. Tuite said the CRA may also help renovate the Million Dollar Theater at Broadway and 3rd Street within the next several years, but renovating all the theaters in the district remains out of fiscal reach.

It is uncertain how much demand there is for more performance theater in the area. The Los Angeles Theater Center, which opened on Spring near 5th Street in 1985, will receive more than $200,000 from the CRA this year to defray operating expenses. Agency officials say they hope the center will eventually become financially independent.

“The fact is, nobody knows how big the market is in Los Angeles for performance theater,” said Bill Bushnell, artistic producing director at the center. “There is a market out there, if you’ve got a program for it.”

In addition to that question, the weekend symposium will feature architects, producers, developers, preservationists and planners from throughout the country speaking on topics such as “Why downtown entertainment districts make sense,” and “The nuts and bolts of theater restoration.”

Although money for the idea seems scarce, most of Broadway’s theaters have a knack for surviving in some form long after their original luster has faded. There are 12 downtown theaters still in use as movie houses and several others are still standing.

Named Fort Street until the 1880s, Broadway began attracting theaters in the early 1900s. At the time, so many theaters had already opened along Spring Street that “there was a possibility that Spring might have been the theater district,” according to Tom Owen, a city librarian who has been tracing the history of downtown theaters for 28 years.

A turning point came in 1911, when the third Los Angeles Orpheum was built on Broadway. Now known as the Palace, it was designed along the model of a classic performance theater, with 2,200 seats distributed over several balconies. Construction of the large vaudeville house “made it fairly clear that our 20th-Century theater district would be on Broadway,” Owen said.

A building boom followed, with more than a dozen performance theaters and movie palaces appearing up and down Broadway over the next two decades, from 3rd Street to Olympic Boulevard.

Theaters were also being built in Hollywood, of course, and Owen said the two areas “were running in tandem” as twin theater districts by the end of the 1920s.

Broadway continued to flourish into the 1930s, its opulent movie palaces becoming a favorite escape from the Great Depression. In the early 1940s, downtown theaters began extending their hours to meet the demands of visiting servicemen.

After World War II, competing theaters elsewhere and television everywhere brought a period of slow decline to Broadway. By the end of the 1950s, Hollywood had “superseded downtown completely” as a center for first-run theaters, said John Miller, vice president of the Historic Theater Foundation.

Meanwhile, the city’s Latino population was growing rapidly, and most of the downtown theaters began switching to Spanish-language films and performances in the early 1960s. The district also attracted audiences from other inner-city neighborhoods, as other local movie houses were torn down. “Whereas before it had been a center for entertainment in Southern California, it was becoming more of a regional entertainment district,” Miller said.

A dramatic upsurge in immigration in the 1970s meant even more Spanish-language film offerings on Broadway. The district strengthened its position in the Latino entertainment world, attracting first-run movies and, at the Million Dollar Theater, Spanish-language variety shows.

Business began to drop off in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, however, as cable television and videocassette recorders “really made inroads into both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking audiences,” Miller said.

In the last year or two, a number of factors have combined to reduce Spanish-language audiences even further, according to Miller, Corwin and Wright. They say that many Mexican-Americans are now more interested in English-language movies. Also, they said, a downturn in business along Broadway in 1987, spurred partly by fear over toughened immigration laws, may have cut into attendance.

Corwin, whose family has operated theaters on Broadway since 1923, said, “Over the 65-year period, it’s been a roller-coaster, and some periods have been better than others. This is not one of the better periods.”

Whatever the future brings to Broadway’s theaters, the imprint of the past is unmistakable. The district, which has been listed in the National Registry of Historic Places, is full of opulent movie houses designed, in the words of theater architect S. Charles Lee, to be “a palace that someone could go in for 35 cents.”

“We tried to make the people feel that they were being entertained the minute they bought a ticket at the box office,” said Lee, who built two of Broadway’s most ornate theaters.

Lee designed the Tower at 8th and Broadway in 1927. Three years later, he built the Los Angeles Theater near 6th and Broadway, a French Renaissance building that Wright calls “truly one of a handful of the finest theaters built in this country.”

Will entertainment on such a grand scale ever return? Lee, who retired in 1950 after designing about 400 theaters, has his doubts. “. . . Television is changing the entertainment mores of the public,” he said. “They’re very fickle as to their entertainment, and very frugal as to what they’ll pay for it.”