Why Palace Theatre matters.
Palace Theatre is a storied performing arts theater where Downtown's Historic Broadway corridor meets an unusually intimate vertical auditorium and the surviving theatrical fabric of the city's earliest major entertainment district.
Set along Broadway near 6th Street and just steps from St. Vincent Court, the theater occupies the historic commercial spine between Spring Street's early financial core, Pershing Square to the west and Broadway's dense succession of former department stores and entertainment buildings extending south toward Olympic Boulevard. A narrow street frontage gives little indication of the volume behind it, with the auditorium rising vertically inside a parcel constrained by the surrounding commercial blocks. Entry from Broadway compresses the transition between sidewalk and performance hall, placing the building directly inside the pedestrian scale of the corridor. Upper seating levels stack the audience steeply toward the stage, producing close visual relationships across a room substantially taller than its street presence suggests. The result is a theater whose compressed urban footprint converts Broadway's dense commercial geography into an unusually concentrated setting for live performance.
What defines Palace Theatre.
Palace Theatre is best known for opening in 1911 as Los Angeles' third home of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit and surviving as the oldest remaining original Orpheum theater in the United States. G. Albert Lansburgh designed the building during a career that made him one of the West's principal theater architects between 1909 and 1930, later creating the fourth Los Angeles Orpheum farther south on Broadway and contributing interiors to the Wiltern and El Capitan. The building opened under the Orpheum name, bringing a major national vaudeville circuit into a purpose-built Los Angeles house during Broadway's emergence as the city's entertainment center. Harry Houdini, Will Rogers, Fred Astaire and the young Rita Hayworth appeared there, joined across the Orpheum years by performers including the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Sarah Bernhardt, Bob Hope and Al Jolson. The circuit transferred to its fourth Broadway theater in 1926, and the former Orpheum subsequently took the Palace name. Changes during the 1930s removed the original box seats and brought enormous pastoral murals by Candelario Rivas to previously altered wall surfaces. The Palace later passed through burlesque, motion pictures and other entertainment uses as Broadway's theatrical economy changed around it. Los Angeles designated the property a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1989, and it stands within the Broadway Theater and Commercial Historic District. The building continues as a special-event and performance property, preserving a direct architectural connection to the national vaudeville network that helped establish Broadway as Los Angeles' first great theater district.
Pre-amplification acoustics governed the auditorium's original performance geometry, placing the human voice at the center of decisions concerning distance, elevation and sound distribution. No seat was designed to sit farther than eighty feet from the stage, limiting the distance an unamplified performer needed to project across the room. Two balconies distribute a large audience vertically, bringing upper spectators forward over portions of the seating below and reducing horizontal depth. That stacking allowed the original house to accommodate close to 2,000 patrons inside a configuration that preserved comparatively short sightlines to performers. Garland-draped columns and French decorative treatment surround the auditorium, placing extensive ornament around a room whose acoustic function preceded electronic reinforcement. Recessed illumination inside three ceiling mural domes used reflectors around electric bulbs to generate a diffuse glow above the audience. Exposed bulbs along balcony borders turned the relatively novel presence of electric lighting into a visible decorative component of the hall. The reduced seating configuration now accommodates 1,000 people, changing audience density across a volume originally engineered for a much larger vaudeville crowd. Stage proximity, vertically layered seating and carefully distributed illumination operate together across a hall conceived for performers who needed to reach a substantial audience through their own voices and physical presence.
How Palace Theatre fits.
Palace Theatre works as the central performance stop in a Downtown route tracing the city's commercial ascent from a Victorian office block through an early movie palace and into the vivacious Art Deco architecture of the interwar retail boom.
Begin at Bradbury Building, commissioned by mining and real-estate millionaire Lewis Bradbury and completed in 1893. Sumner P. Hunt produced plans for the project before George H. Wyman took control of construction, leaving the precise authorship of the finished design contested. Behind the restrained Romanesque Revival exterior, a glazed atrium rises almost fifty feet through open cage elevators, marble stairs and elaborate iron railings. The building later became a recurring film location, appearing in Double Indemnity, Blade Runner and The Artist, and a major restoration during the early 1990s formed part of the Grand Central Square project. Continue to Million Dollar Theatre, Sid Grauman's 1918 movie palace at 3rd Street and Broadway. William Lee Woollett designed an interior incorporating imagery from John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, including characters and objects worked into the organ grilles. A 110-foot balcony presented a major engineering challenge during a wartime steel shortage, leading to development of a reinforced-concrete girder whose strength was demonstrated under 1.5 million pounds of sandbags. Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw and Lionel Hampton later performed there as jazz and big-band programming entered the house during the 1940s. Conclude at Eastern Columbia Building, Claud Beelman's thirteen-story headquarters for the Eastern Outfitting Company and Columbia Outfitting Company, completed in 1930 after nine months of construction. Glossy turquoise terra cotta, blue-and-gold trim, zigzags, chevrons and stylized plant and animal forms turn the reinforced-concrete tower into one of Broadway's most elaborate Art Deco compositions. A four-sided neon clock crowns the building above a recessed two-story entrance originally feeding a retail arcade through the property. A $30 million conversion created 140 condominiums in 2006, followed by a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award in 2008. The progression moves from the Bradbury Building's nineteenth-century experiment in light and vertical circulation through Grauman's engineering-intensive movie palace and culminates at Beelman's turquoise tower from the height of Broadway's metropolitan retail era.
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