I had taken two of the eight Los Angeles Conservancy guided walking tours already: The Victorian homes tour in Angelino Heights and the Art Deco buildings walk in downtown L.A. I learned a lot about both styles of architecture and how they fit into the history of Los Angeles, so I was really looking forward to the Broadway Theatre walking tour on Saturday morning. Imagine my dismay when our tour leader announced, as we were leaving Pershing Square where the tours begin, that he didn’t know much about architecture. And, sadly, he went on the prove it during this 3 hour walk along Broadway. But he did know a lot about the theater people in old Los Angeles.
Apparently the Broadway Theater walking tour is geared more toward tourists, like the 3 young Polish women in our group–rather than locals interested in architecture and the revitalization of the old heart of L.A. Instead of learning about building styles, we heard tales of performers and owners of a dozen old vaudeville and movie theaters.
It turned out that our tour leader was the son of a theater manager, starting back in the 1920s. By the 1950s, his father was the head of advertising for the Metropolitan theater chain and on Saturday mornings would bring his son to the Orpheum Theater to watch movies while Dad worked in his office upstairs. Fast forward 65 years later: every time our leader revisits the Orpheum, he takes a trip down memory lane.
He also told tales of Charlies Chaplin, Milton Berle and Jack Benny. Benny met his wife who worked at the May Company department store across the street from the Orpheum while on a break between performances. And perhaps the most scandalous story: Alex Pantages the owner of a major chain of vaudeville theaters, as an old man in the mid 1920s, was convicted of raping an usher in one of his theaters. The sentence: 50 years in prison. On appeal the decision was reversed, and he promptly sold his theater to Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers movies fame. Pantages died 3 years later.
While these stories stuck in my mind, the theaters did not. 14 movie houses in 3 hours is too much. They all began to blur together.
