San Fernando Valley : City’s Oldest Theater to Face Wrecking Ball Next Year

In its heyday, Glendale’s oldest theater was a hub of stage and screen entertainment, a venue founded in the era of silent films and vaudeville that thrived well into the age of talkies and Technicolor.

Now the Glendale Theater is a dilapidated, stripped-down building frequented by vandals. City officials said Monday that the theater and several other aging buildings are tentatively scheduled to be razed early next year to make way for a $25-million redevelopment project.

“It probably has a lot of history, but it’s really a dump now,” said John Hedlund, who took ownership of the building by default when a previous owner defaulted on a loan five years ago. Hedlund had originally hoped to convert the building to a supper club and revival-house theater, but he was unable to find investors.

The two-story, 1,400-seat brick theater at 120 S. Brand Blvd., complete with a three-chamber pipe organ, was said to be the largest in Southern California when it opened in October, 1920.

Several years ago, when the Glendale Redevelopment Agency began planning the project now known as the proposed Glendale Marketplace, the Glendale Historical Society asked city staffers to consider saving the theater and other old buildings and incorporate them into the development.

“In the end, we decided not to take a stand on the theater,” said Andrea Humberger of the historical society, which helped save a well-preserved nearby office building from the wrecking ball. “Not because it’s not historically significant, but because it had been altered so much, and was so deteriorated.”