A once-famous street now a ghost town
by Nimisha Thakore
The long stretch of pavement between 3rd and 9th streets on Broadway is quiet in its own way, despite the heavy wheezing and rumbling of orange Metro buses trailing wisps of oily smoke in their wake. Small Latino shops line the six blocks and at 8 p.m. on a weekday, many of them have already called it a night and rolled down their sheets of metal barriers.
This is Los Angeles’ historic theater district.
Small crowds of working class Angelenos gather at street corners to wait for a bus home, a bus away from this street that was once something more than it is now. Trash bins overflow onto the sidewalk. Wrinkled old men sit on stools outside the few shops that are open, skeptically eyeing passersby. Homeless people lie curled up in the shadowy space between brick walls and pavement.
“Broadway is kind of… just slowly rotting away,” said Michael Zoldessy, chairman of the Historic Theaters Committee, part of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which aims to preserve and bring awareness to the state of the ages-old theaters.
This isn’t the way it’s always been.
The theater district is lined with a dozen pre-WWII theaters, once lavish palaces, most of which have now fallen into abandoned disrepair [see map]. Once upon a time, Los Angeles’ theater district was a bustling entertainment center, complete with department stores, streetcars, and regal theaters hosting vaudeville shows and nickelodeons. But with Sid Grauman’s (the same showman who brought fame to Broadway with his Million Dollar Theater) construction of the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in 1922 and the Chinese Theater in 1927, the splendor of Broadway began trickling northeast to Hollywood.
“There are only three theaters – the Million Dollar, the Orpheum, the Los Angeles – I would say are kind of on the road to where they need to be right now,” said Zoldessy.
One by one, the theaters closed their doors and now, only five operate as theaters or for special events and location filming (the Million Dollar Theater, Los Angeles Theatre, Palace Theatre, Tower Theatre, and the Orpheum Theatre). The rest have been converted to retail shops or simply sit forsaken. The State Theater and United Artist Theatre are now home to churches.
But according to Zoldessy, the past five years have seen some progress in developing the surrounding neighborhood.
“It’s really been cleaned up and there’s more new businesses opening up,” he said. “We’re renovating spaces and being a little kinder to the architecture in those buildings.”
There’s still not enough traffic to keep the theaters alive, especially in the face of sprouting new entertainment hubs like L.A. Live. But despite the loss of some special events and premieres to a more chic downtown, they shouldn’t pose too much of a threat to Broadway, which will likely never screen movies or aim to become such an “entertainment campus,” according to Zoldessy.
“People in L.A. will go to whatever’s the hot new thing but that only lasts so long until people move on to the next hot new thing,” he said.
The movie palaces of yore are now sandwiched between retail shops, parking structures and dismal slate-gray slabs of wall spattered with graffiti. Many of them are easy to miss walking by – you might never know that in the early part of the 20th century, that broken building was a place where people laughed and cried in front of silver screens. But the theaters, despite their collected dust, are souvenirs of an era of grandeur and excess in Los Angeles’ film industry.
“We have this unique opportunity to hold on to this old part of the city,” said Zoldessy.
Los Angeles’ theater district likely will never again be what it once was, but its movie palaces are worth preserving for memories of a more luxurious time if for nothing else.
December 10, 2009