rejectomorph | Pricks

I've spent quite a bit of time recently plucking nettles out of the back yard. When their seed pods dry, they leap onto any passing creature and cling. They are especially fond of hitching rides on cats, so I want to get them out of the yard before the kittens get covered with them. The kittens will still get them if they venture outside the yard, which I'm sure they soon will, but I want to minimize the hazard. I doubt they'd let me comb the nettles out of their fur as Alger used to do. Poor Alger, if he is still alive, won't have anybody to do that for him this summer. Anyway, I've gotten lots of the little stickers in my hands, and they hurt. I should have plucked them when they were smaller.

A few of summer's dry clouds have been drifting over today, but with evening the haze is returning. The only distinct clouds remaining are those piled against the mountains. At least we got a few intermittent minutes of shade out of them this afternoon before they decamped. Any shade is welcome on such a day— nettle shade excepted, of course, but only crawling insects would miss that.

The Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles will be 100 years old tomorrow. It was about half that age when I used to go there, but already seemed ancient. There's going to be a special screening of "Sunset Boulevard" (the theater isn't regularly open, but it's still largely intact and usable.) I'd go, but it's several hundred miles away. Lots more pictures and some mostly accurate text here.

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From:

daisydumont.livejournal.com

it's kind of you to eradicate as many of the nettles as you can, for the cats' sake. poor alger. i hope he's thriving somewhere.

what a beautiful old theater! i like the photo with the Palace signs lit in blue in the dark.

From:

rejectomorph

Broadway in downtown Los Angeles probably has the best concentrated collection of surviving palatial movie theaters in the world. The Palace is the oldest of the seven big ones, though two of the smaller ones are a year older.

The Orpheum Theatre (plus its official web site) is the only one that has been fully restored.

The Los Angeles Theatre (also with an official web site,) like the Palace, is partly restored. You might recognize parts of it, as in recent years it has frequently been used as a location for movies and lots of television commercials.

The Palace and Los Angeles are among four Broadway theaters owned by the Delijani family. They also own the Tower Theatre (also with an official web site,) one of the three smaller houses still standing on Broadway, and the State Theatre, the largest surviving theater in downtown Los Angeles, which is currently leased to a church.

The Million Dollar Theatre (another with an official web site) is also partly restored, and has reopened on part-time basis.

Then there's the Globe Theatre, originally a legitimate playhouse, then a movie theater, and now a night club called Club Seven Forty. Much of the architectural detail is still intact, but the floor has been flattened for dancing and table seating. The Broadway entrance is closed up, and you have to enter through the alley. The place has a somewhat rakish reputation.

Then there's the United Artists Theatre, which was long owned by television minister Gene Scott, and still serves as his ministry's headquarters. Scott kept the place in excellent condition, though unfortunately the auditorium's mezzanine seating area had already been yanked out when the house was altered for the installation of a wide-screen process called Cinemiracle in the 1950s. The church put the building up for sale in 2010, and its future use is uncertain.

The Roxie Theatre was the last theater built on Broadway, opening in 1931. In recent years its auditorium has been used for storage, and it's in pretty rough shape.

Right next to the Roxie are the two oldest surviving theaters on Broadway; the Cameo and the Arcade, both opened in 1910, the year before the Palace opened. They are both smaller theaters, the Cameo having been a nickelodeon and the Arcade the first Los Angeles house built by the Pantages vaudeville circuit. Like the Roxie, they have both had their auditoriums used for storage and their lobbies converted to retail use. The Arcade has lost most of its original decor, but quite a bit of the Cameo's remains intact.

Finally, there's the Rialto Theatre, the interior of which has been almost entirely gutted. This theater had what was probably the earliest example of a stadium seating section of any theater in Los Angeles, but its best surviving feature is its long marquee, dating from the 1930s.

From:

rejectomorph

All twelve theaters are part of an official historical district listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and there is a strong local organization protecting them. Like the Delijani family, the owners of the Million Dollar and the Orpheum are dedicated to preserving their theaters, so half of the theaters are pretty secure, as long as their owners have the financial resources to keep them in good condition. The others, despite their historic designation, are less so.

But, for now, the biggest threats to their survival are probably fire, or the inevitable major earthquake which will one day destroy much of downtown Los Angeles. Any of the theaters that don't get seismic retrofits by the time it strikes (and probably even a few that do) will then be piles of historic rubble.

From:

daisydumont.livejournal.com

wow, thank you for those links! i'll spend some time looking through the sites with interest. wish i had seen some of those buildings, the one time i was in LA. well, i wasn't in LA -- i was in anaheim with my uncle's family and then pomona with my great-aunt -- but one daytrip down into the city was memorable. (we went to olvera street for lunch. i always remember the food, of course. heh.)

what you say about rubble makes me think of post-apocalyptic films that show the statue of liberty in the sand or whatever. or detroit, for that matter. did you see that ad for chrysler that eminem starred in for the superbowl? i had had no idea that detroit used to be so beautiful till that ad sent me looking at websites. it's a shame time's taken such a toll on old architecture around the country. (you know it was a good ad, too, because i remembered that it was chrysler, not a detail i'd ordinarily bother keeping in mind. *g*)

From:

rejectomorph

I didn't see the Chrysler commercial, but I've seen plenty of old photos of downtown Detroit, and it was a splendid place. It's ironic that the automobile industry financed the building of so much of downtown Detroit, but also facilitated the suburbanization that led to the dismantling of most of the downtowns in the United States, including Detroit's. The when the American automobile industry declined, all of Detroit declined with it.

Los Angeles was fortunate in three ways. First, it wasn't a company town dominated by a single industry as Detroit was, so when one or another of its industries went into decline, there were other businesses on which the city could still thrive.

Second, the main freeway downtown was built several blocks west of Broadway, so when the bankers and other financial businesses (which had long been centered on Spring Street, one block east of Broadway) expanded their operations, they didn't build their new buildings on Broadway, but leapfrogged west to Flower Street or Figueroa Street, leaving the main stretch of Broadway largely unchanged for decades.

Third, when the anglo population largely abandoned downtown for outlying shopping districts, a huge influx of immigrants from Mexico who moved into surrounding neighborhoods began patronizing Broadway's businesses. Those theaters survived as long as they did largely because they were able to switch to Spanish language movies. And as late as the 1980s, Broadway still had the highest retail sales per square foot of any shopping district in Southern California except for one: pricey Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

The theaters were able to prosper with Spanish language movies because, before cable came along, Los Angeles had only one or two television stations with programming in Spanish, so Spanish speakers who wanted to see movies in their native language had to go to theaters. Even though there were dozens of outlying neighborhood theaters showing movies in Spanish, the Broadway houses got the best movies first, and it was not unusual for the houses to be packed on weekends.

A couple of the theaters continued to show movies in English, catering largely to the younger Mexican Americans who still lived with their parents in the old neighborhoods. But in the 1980s, the Mexican population began moving to suburban neighborhoods in large numbers, and they were displaced mostly by immigrants from Asia and Central America. The Asians built new multiplexes in neighborhoods near downtown, and Central Americans never seemed to have the appetite for movies that Mexicans have— plus the area was gradually being wired for cable, and there were now many choices for Spanish language viewers.

Several of the downtown theaters closed in the 1980s, and most of the rest were closed by the end of the 1990s, but the Spanish speakers had extended the lives of the theaters by at least two decades. Most American downtowns had lost most or all of their movie palaces by the end of the 1960s. Those in Los Angeles survived long enough to become the objects of the preservation movement.

From:

daisydumont.livejournal.com

here's the ad, which knocked me out: imported from detroit.

that's very interesting about the influx of mexicans and so on. it surprises me that the central americans aren't as movie-mad. here near DC & Baltimore, we have a diverse latino population, mexican, south and central american. i've talked to salvadorans, mexicans, hondurans, costa ricans, venezuelans, etc. the radio stations have designated time slots for the individual countries, with old-home news and musical styles. i haven't noticed any spanish-language movie places, but nowadays there's cable tv, plus all the little stores that rent movies and such.

i need to learn more about architecture. on trips into DC or Baltimore, i've been oblivious, mostly worried about the crowds. :D

From:

rejectomorph

Speaking of architecture, C. Howard Crane, who designed the Fox Theatre in the commercial, was alsto the architect of the United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles. His office was in Detroit, and a majority of his theaters were in or near Michigan, but he did a number of them in more distant places, including a few in the UK, and quite a few scattered around Canada.

The Detroit Fox still has a fucntioning Wurlitzer theater organ.