Why you should experience The Wiltern in Los Angeles, California.
The Wiltern is a vivacious Art Deco theater where Koreatown's metropolitan character meets saturated ornament, grand-scale performance and one of Wilshire Boulevard's most recognizable architectural compositions.
Set along Wilshire Boulevard near South Western Avenue and just steps from the Wilshire/Western intersection, the theater occupies the base of a turquoise office tower at a major crossroads where dense commercial blocks rise around one of Central Los Angeles' principal east-west corridors. Twin vertical signs frame a recessed entrance beneath the marquee, leading through patterned terrazzo into an oval lobby enriched by decorative metalwork, murals and a sweeping staircase. Passing into the auditorium expands the encounter dramatically beneath an eighty-foot ceiling, where curving balcony fronts and a broad proscenium focus the room toward the stage. Gold-leaf ornament, painted surfaces and geometric detailing continue across walls and ceilings, giving the interior a visual intensity distinct from the comparatively compressed entrance sequence. The result is a theater whose soaring auditorium and concentrated Art Deco decoration turn the transition from Wilshire Boulevard to the stage into an architectural event of exceptional scale.
What you should know about The Wiltern.
The Wiltern is best known for opening on October 7, 1931 as Warner Bros.' Western Theatre within the Pellissier Building, a twelve-story Art Deco complex commissioned by Henry de Roulet and the Pellissier family during Wilshire Boulevard's rapid commercial expansion. Stiles O. Clements of Morgan, Walls & Clements designed the office tower and exterior complex, using deeply recessed windows, emphatic vertical piers and blue-green glazed terra cotta to accentuate a structure rising to the city's prevailing 150-foot height limit. Theater specialist G. Albert Lansburgh designed the interior, bringing expertise developed through major movie palaces including the Orpheum and Palace into a house originally accommodating more than 2,300 patrons. Warner Bros. inaugurated the theater with Alexander Hamilton, starring George Arliss, and constructed a temporary bridge across Wilshire Boulevard for opening night after the city declined to close the street; Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks, Loretta Young and James Cagney joined the crowd surrounding the premiere. Anthony Heinsbergen's decorative work culminated in the auditorium ceiling, where a radiating composition of stylized skyscrapers projected an imagined architectural future for Wilshire Boulevard against multicolored stars. A four-manual, 37-rank Kimball organ transferred from the Forum Theatre added one of the most substantial theater instruments in the western United States to the original house. Warner Bros. relinquished its lease during the Depression, and the theater reopened during the mid-1930s under the Wil-Tern name, combining Wilshire and Western into the designation that eventually became Wiltern. The Pellissier family sold the property to Franklin Life Insurance Company in 1956, beginning a later period of decline that placed the entire complex at risk despite the architectural ambition of its first decades.
Preservation transformed The Wiltern from a threatened movie palace into a major live-performance venue. Demolition plans surfaced in 1979 as the theater closed and the Pellissier Building entered the National Register of Historic Places, prompting Rick Newberger's Citizens' Committee to Save the Wiltern and the newly formed Los Angeles Conservancy to mobilize around the complex. The Cultural Heritage Commission delayed demolition for a year, and the Conservancy financed an alternative-use feasibility study through the National Trust for Historic Preservation before staging a public rally with Los Angeles City Councilmember John Ferraro. Developer Wayne Ratkovich and Ratkovich, Bowers & Perez purchased the property in May 1981, placing architect Brenda Levin at the center of a four-year rehabilitation. Levin and theater consultants Shepardson/Winner tracked down original fixtures, reacquired surviving examples and reconstructed missing pieces; doors and hardware returned, murals were repainted, Deco-patterned carpeting was woven for the interior and seats salvaged from Portland's Paramount Theatre were refurbished for the auditorium. Tony Heinsbergen, son of the original decorative painter, participated in recreating the ceiling treatment from surviving design information, reconnecting the restoration directly with the family responsible for the earlier decorative program. Exterior work revived the marquee and vertical neon signs, and the Los Angeles Conservancy received a conservation easement protecting significant portions of the façade. More than 2,300 people attended the reopening gala in May 1985, converting one of the organization's earliest preservation campaigns into a functioning performance hall. The intervention later received a City of Los Angeles Historic Preservation Award of Excellence, securing the restored theater as a working cultural property instead of a static remnant of Wilshire Boulevard's movie-palace era.
How to fold The Wiltern into your trip.
The Wiltern works as the anchor for a Koreatown sequence tracing how automobile commerce, religious patronage and luxury retail produced radically different architectural responses to Wilshire's westward expansion during the late 1920s.
Begin at Chapman Plaza, opened in 1929 as Chapman Park Market and designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements as one of the western United States' earliest markets conceived specifically for motorists. A fortress-like Spanish Colonial Revival exterior with Churrigueresque corner towers enclosed a courtyard reached directly through an arched automobile entrance, allowing shoppers to park among grocers, produce sellers, a bakery and other specialized merchants. A rooftop sign addressed passing Wilshire traffic, and centralized refrigeration and a public-address system placed advanced commercial infrastructure behind the historicist exterior. Wayne Ratkovich and Brenda Levin rehabilitated the property 1990, preserving the automobile-centered courtyard as the surrounding district became a center of Korean American commerce and dining. Continue to Wilshire Boulevard Temple, dedicated in 1929 for Congregation B'nai B'rith after Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin guided the congregation west from its earlier downtown home. Architects A. M. Adelman, S. Tilden Norton and David C. Allison created an octagonal sanctuary beneath a Byzantine dome spanning 100 feet and rising 140 feet, pairing it with a Romanesque entrance and rose window. The Warner brothers commissioned Hugo Ballin's murals depicting 3,000 years of Jewish history, and Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle, Sol Lesser and Sid Grauman financed stained glass, chandeliers, marble columns and other components, binding Hollywood patronage directly to the building. Conclude at Bullock's Wilshire / Southwestern Law School, completed in 1929 as a luxury department store designed by John and Donald Parkinson around Los Angeles' emerging automobile culture. Its principal entrance faced the rear parking area through an elaborate porte cochere, reversing conventional pedestrian-oriented department-store planning, and a 241-foot verdigris-coated tower advertised the building to motorists approaching along Wilshire. Custom Lalique lighting and commissioned artwork by more than a dozen artists extended that ambition through interiors created for a new model of suburban luxury shopping. Southwestern Law School acquired the property after the store's decline and spent a decade and $29 million restoring historic features for academic use. The progression moves from a drive-in market through a sanctuary financed by major Hollywood figures into a department store reoriented around the automobile, tracing three institutions that converted Wilshire's 1920s expansion into new forms of commercial, religious and architectural ambition.
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