At the heart of downtown’s jewelry district...

At the heart of downtown’s jewelry district stands the Pantages Theater, a storied Los Angeles landmark with a history every bit as colorful as its swashbuckling builder. Once one of the city’s most prestigious vaudeville houses, the downtown Pantages, on the northwest corner of 7th and Hill streets, flourished during the 1920s and 1930s.

Theater magnate Alexander Pantages built the seven-story structure in 1919, making it the 16th of what was to become a chain of 80 theaters across the nation. Pantages also built Los Angeles theaters on Broadway and on Hollywood Boulevard.

In the 1940s, Warner Bros. bought the theater on Hill and renamed it “Warner’s Downtown.” Although it retains its jeweled WB shield (minus the letters), the theater has been sold several times over the years and was used as a flamboyant church in the 1950s.

In 1968, some scenes from “Funny Girl,” starring Barbra Streisand, were filmed there.

Theater, church, movie set. Now it is called the Jewelry Theater Building and owned by Wanis (Joseph) Koyomejian and other partners, who bought it in 1988 for more than $16 million.

Koyomejian, however, is awaiting trial on money-laundering, conspiracy and drug charges. Prosecutors said that more than $700 million in cocaine profits were laundered through the downtown jewelry district between 1986 and 1989, one of the largest and most elaborate laundering schemes ever uncovered in the United States.

An estimated 50,000 people make their living in the jewelry businesses that fill the 30 buildings on and near Hill Street. Armored cars make pickups and deliveries around the clock. Couriers hurry through the streets clutching worn satchels and trundling catalogue cases that could contain anything from metal pendants to priceless custom necklaces. People greet one another in many languages, and million-dollar sales are made with a handshake.

The wheeling and dealing is an appropriate monument to Pantages, a Greek immigrant who landed in Alaska when he was 18 and used a $24 grubstake from “Klondike Kate” Rockwell, one of the fabulous characters of the Yukon, to start a honky-tonk dance hall.

Pantages prospered from selling lusty entertainment to miners, but his dance hall burned down three times.

He took $4,000 he made on the business and headed for Seattle, where he bought his first movie theater and became the first to combine movies with vaudeville.

He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he expanded his theater empire.

In 1923, his downtown Pantages became the scene of a live tragedy surpassing anything on its stage or screen. Minutes before show time, members of a touring vaudeville troupe became involved in a heated argument. The fire-eater shot and killed his cousin, the contortionist, then shot himself in the head.

At the peak of his wealth and power in 1929, Pantages was accused of raping a 17-year-old dancer, Eunice Pringle, in the second-floor office of his theater. On a sultry August afternoon, Pringle ran screaming down the stairs and into the arms of a traffic cop.

After two years of sensational trials and $250,000 in legal fees, Pantages was acquitted. One of Pantages’ biographers said that when Pringle was on her deathbed she confessed that she had been paid by Joseph Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy and patriarch of the Kennedy clan, to frame Pantages.

Kennedy, a Prohibition-era bootlegger, owned the Orpheum Circuit Theaters--which ran a distant second to the Pantages empire. According to the biographer, Pringle said she was paid to accuse Pantages because Kennedy wanted control of the Pantages empire.

The final curtain fell on Pantages’ colorful and adventurous life in February, 1936, when he died of a heart attack at age 67.