Why Westlake Theatre matters.
Westlake Theatre is an ornate movie palace where Westlake's entertainment heritage meets Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, theatrical ornament and the surviving scale of Los Angeles neighborhood cinema culture.
Set along South Alvarado Street near West 6th Street and just steps from the dense commercial blocks east of Park View Street, the historic theater occupies a prominent corner parcel marked by a towering vertical sign and richly modeled street façade. Cast-stone and terra-cotta ornament rises above storefronts into arched openings, decorative relief and an elaborate upper composition that gives the building unusual vertical presence along the commercial corridor. Entering the theater shifts the encounter toward a voluminous auditorium organized around a broad balcony, deep stage opening and elaborate decorative surfaces conceived for nearly two thousand patrons. Coffered ceilings, arched organ screens, ornamental plaster and layered lobby volumes add a second physical dimension, carrying the architectural treatment from the public façade through increasingly theatrical interior spaces. The result is a neighborhood movie palace whose surviving architecture preserves the ambition and performance that accompanied Los Angeles cinema exhibition during the 1920s.
What defines Westlake Theatre.
Westlake Theatre is best known for the movie palace designed by Richard Mortimer Bates Jr. for West Coast Theatres and opened on September 22, 1926 with seating for 1,949 patrons. Its inaugural program paired the feature Other Women's Husbands with Charlie Nelson and his Band and a Fanchon and Marco stage production, immediately combining motion pictures, live music and vaudeville within a single evening. Bates developed the building through Spanish Colonial and Mission-derived forms enriched with Churrigueresque floral and cartouche relief, giving a neighborhood theater architectural treatment associated with the elaborate movie palaces spreading across Southern California during the decade. Muralist Anthony Heinsbergen supplied decorative painting throughout the auditorium and lobby, including the expansive composition above the proscenium that became one of the interior's principal artistic features. A two-manual, ten-rank Wurlitzer organ supported the original performance program, extending the building's technical capacity beyond projected film into musical accompaniment and stage presentation. West Coast Theatres evolved into Fox West Coast in 1929, placing the house within one of the region's dominant theater circuits as first-run pictures and live presentations continued drawing audiences. Films including F. W. Murnau's Sunrise and Buster Keaton's The Cameraman subsequently played there alongside newsreels, comedy shorts, orchestral performances and touring stage acts. The theater consequently emerged during a period when neighborhood cinemas operated as complete entertainment institutions, with architecture, decorative art, music and screen programming assembled into a unified public performance.
A major modernization less than a decade after opening introduced a second architectural era. Fox West Coast engaged theater architect S. Charles Lee in 1935 to rework the marquee, box office and lobby, layering streamlined decorative elements onto Bates's earlier Spanish composition as exhibition practices changed during the sound-film era. The theater gradually shifted from first-run programming to second- and third-run films before Metropolitan Theatres acquired it during the 1960s and developed Spanish-language and Spanish-subtitled programming for the surrounding community. Metropolitan sold the property in 1991, ending 65 years of film exhibition, and conversion to an indoor swap meet inserted a level concrete floor across the former orchestra seating area. Historic-Cultural Monument designation followed that year as number 546, formally recognizing the building during the same period that its original theatrical function disappeared. The Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles purchased the property in 2008 with plans for rehabilitation as a live-entertainment venue, and National Register recognition followed in 2010 before dissolution of the agency halted the redevelopment effort. A successor agency sold the property to 634 Alvarado LLP for $2 million in 2018. By July 2026, Strindberg Laboratory had begun organizing a community coalition around a proposed $6-8 million acquisition and restoration campaign for performances, screenings, workshops and civic uses, opening another chapter in the century-old theater's repeated adaptation.
How Westlake Theatre fits.
Westlake Theatre works as the anchor for a Westlake exploration connecting early apartment-house luxury, neighborhood library development and a major religious institution built during the district's architectural expansion.
Begin at The Bryson, the apartment hotel developer Hugh W. Bryson commissioned after assembling its Wilshire Boulevard site beginning in 1911. Architects Frederick Noonan and Charles H. Kysor developed the ten-story Beaux Arts building after neighborhood opposition prompted Bryson to abandon an earlier six-story proposal and set the larger structure farther back from the adjoining streets. Opening in January 1913, its 96 apartments incorporated mahogany woodwork, tiled kitchens and bathrooms and built-in cedar chests, with service extending to furnished china and silver. The building demonstrated how apartment living was being recast for affluent households as Wilshire expanded westward, and its later rehabilitation received a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award. Continue to Felipe de Neve Branch Library, developed after city librarian Everett Perry and park officials considered a Lafayette Park site that carried a requirement for a $100,000 building. The Library Board selected a 6th Street parcel and commissioned architect Austin Whittlesey, whose Mediterranean and Classical Revival design was constructed in spring 1929 under a $29,655 building contract. Separate expenditures funded electrical work, plumbing and heating, with another $4,857.65 devoted to furniture and $10,000 appropriated for the initial book collection. The building opened July 1 with capacity for 25,000 volumes and later entered the National Register as part of the Los Angeles Branch Library System. Conclude at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, the fifth home of a congregation founded in 1867 and the city's oldest Protestant congregation in continuous service. James E. and David C. Allison designed the present Gothic Revival complex, completed in 1932 with more than 500 tons of reinforcing steel embedded within its concrete structure. Its 157-foot tower draws from Magdalen College at Oxford, and more than 150 caissons extend as deep as 45 feet into bedrock beneath the building. Canadian artist Albert Gilles added three-inch-thick bronze entrance doors in 1946, each weighing 1,000 pounds and carrying scenes from the life of Christ. The progression moves from an ambitious apartment hotel through a purpose-built branch library and culminates in a vast reinforced-concrete church complex, tracing three institutional forms through which Westlake absorbed Los Angeles' metropolitan expansion during the early twentieth century.
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