View from the side of the balcony.
The Arcade Theatre in Los Angeles, California originally opened on September 26, 1910 as the Pantages Theatre. It was designed in the Beaux-Arts style by the Morgan & Walls architecture firm and was a part of the Pantages Vaudeville Circuit. Morgan & Walls are also known for designing the Mayan and El Capitan Theaters in Los Angeles. The location of the 1,400 seat theater helped to make downtown Los Angeles an entertainment destination, and 11 more theaters opened in the area between 1910 and 1931.
The Arcade was the first theater on the Pantages Vaudeville circuit in southern California.
Vaudeville singer and comedian Sophie Tucker appeared at the Arcade’s opening day celebration as part of her first West Coast tour. Other opening day acts included a one act pantomime called “A Hot Time in Dogville,” singer Maurice Burkhart, a musical comedy sketch by the Lelliott Brothers, and the Yalto Duo dancers. On Christmas Day 1913, an unusual wedding took place on the theater’s stage — Napoleon, a vaudeville-performing and silent film starring chimpanzee “married” Sally, another chimpanzee from the E&R Jungle Zoo. The theater closed in December of 1921 so that a photoplayer, an automatic mechanical orchestra to accompany silent films, could be installed.
Souvenir programs from the theater’s opening day were printed on silk.
Pantages sold the building in 1925 to the Dalton Brothers, who owned the nearby Folles Theater. It was renamed Dalton’s Theatre (or Dalton’s Broadway) until 1928 when the name was changed to the Arcade Theatre, after the Broadway Spring Arcade Building, which is located directly next to the theater. The Dalton Brothers renovated the Arcade in 1932, and reopened it as a burlesque house on July 30, 1932. Lou Costello (of Abbott and Costello) was one of the comedians who performed at the theater during this time.
All of the seats were removed after the theater closed in 1992.
In 1938, famed theater architect S. Charles Lee remodeled the interior of the theater, which reduced the seating to 800, changed the foyer to the Moderne style, and updated the building’s facade. On August 22, 1941 the Arcade became a Telenews Theatre, which ran newsreels from 8AM to 3AM the next day. The opening newsreel was called “This World Besieged,” and was about World War II. This change lasted only four months, and by mid-November 1941 the Arcade was back to showing feature films.
The mural in the center of the proscenium has long been painted over.
The Arcade was an independent theater in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1970s, keno was played at the theater every night at 8PM. Metropolitan Theatres ran the Arcade as a grindhouse (a theater that ran three or four different films on repeat) until it closed in 1992. The following year the lobby was converted into a retail space. It is currently an electronics store, and the stage is used as a storage space for the store’s inventory. There have been a few proposals to restore the theater, including one that would have it and two other theaters turned into a restaurant and multiplex complex, but none have come to pass.
Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy) performed at the Arcade in 1919.
During the first burlesque show someone threw a stink bomb on stage and injured one of the dancers.
For more on the Arcade and many other Los Angeles Theatres be sure to visit: https://losangelestheatres.blogspot.com/
After the Final Curtain 
Bravo! Glad you got in the Arcade. And such lovely photos. Great work, sir!
Thanks Bill! Wait til you see my Roxie post.
Thanks for this tour…pics are, of course, fantastic, but I also love, and am saddened by, the detail of the stink-bomb. Life and times of a palace…
I was too. I assumed it was a sort of protest about the change in formats, but I didn’t see any follow up articles.
The first booth I worked for Local 150 was at the Arcade. It was an all night house running 3 or 4 features starting in the late morning and then repeat until 5 of so the next morning. The competition was the Cameo located more or less next door.
About halfway through the middle shift that I was assigned, I got a call from downstairs to stop the movie and bring up the house lights. The manager rolled a keno wheel out on stage, made a few spins, awarded a few small prizes and then back to the film.
Quite an introduction to the Los Angeles movie theatre scene in the early 80s. Lots of folks needing a place to sit for the night mixed in with a few industry folks and film students wanting to see a title that only played a house like this years after its first release back before VHS.
Broadway was really something in those days, shabby but still a glorious reflection of what life was like some years earlier when downtown was really the focus of city life. Walking that faded street after work around midnight was unique. And then it was off to Shipps for a early AM meal before heading home.
They did the keno in the middle of the movies? That’s strange. Thanks for the look into being a projectionist in LA in the early 80s.
The Roxie! Wonderful. You have a divine talent for getting into difficult places. Cheers! A toast to you.