Stage Set to Make El Portal Theater a City Landmark

The venerable El Portal theater, which has housed more controversy than theater in recent years, will very likely become Los Angeles’ newest historic-cultural monument.

The designation for the North Hollywood theater was approved by a City Council committee earlier this week and is scheduled to come before the full council on Tuesday.

The council almost always approves committee decisions on historic-cultural status. But the holder of El Portal’s long-term lease, Bernard Kaufman, said he might speak against the designation at the council meeting.

“I just have not made up my mind on that yet,” he said.

The move to give the building historic-cultural status was started by Jeff Nelson, a UCLA political science student and part-time proofreader of technical manuals. “I have lived in the area for the last seven years and I was intrigued by the architecture of the El Portal,” said Nelson, 32. “I thought it should be preserved.

“I took a class at UCLA, in the architecture department, on how to get a building protected status.”

He has also formed a group, Friends of the El Portal, which has about a dozen members.

The theater opened Oct. 5, 1926, with the silent film “Blarney” and a live stage show that, according to a newspaper account, featured “a company of Chinese actors and actresses assisted by a Chinese jazz orchestra.”

In the past two years, the theater has been used sporadically. But it got into the news as the site of a riot during a rock concert, a scheme to present live theater that ended with the conviction of its perpetrator on fraud charges, and a concert by rapper Ice-T at the height of the controversy over his song “Cop Killer.”

On the same day the council is expected to vote on the building’s historic-cultural status, the most current controversy over the building’s use will be raging at a meeting of the North Hollywood Project Area Committee, a citizens group elected to advise the city on proposed redevelopment projects in the area.

Several members of the group are angry that the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency has approved a $250,000 grant and loan package to go to a local theater group that plans to renovate and move into the building.

Members of the citizens group have said the redevelopment money could be better spent for improvements to businesses in the somewhat run-down area along Lankershim Boulevard.