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Introduction: South Broadway

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South Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles has survived several eras of media transformation. As the first historic theater district listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, the street boasts the largest concentration of historic movie theaters and palaces in the country. The twelve surviving theaters were preserved in large part due to the business provided by Latino shoppers and theatergoers. An era known as Broadway’s “Latino Renaissance” began in the 1950s and lasted into the early 1990s, with Frank Fouce ("impresario of Spanish-language entertainment") and the Metropolitan Company, led by the Corwin family, programming Spanish-language films in many of South Broadway’s theaters during that time. After official designation as a district, city politicians began to court real-estate investors and developers they hoped would fund ambitious and costly restorations of the remaining movie palaces and theaters on the street. For example, Ira Yellin, Ezat Delijani and even televangelist Gene Scott (explored in more detail in “Histories Concealed”) were approached by mayors or granted sizable tax incentives in order to invest Downtown, whereas previously these finances may have been directed toward funding development on the Westside or other parts of the city.
 
Ira Yellin’s purchase of the Million Dollar Theatre, Ezat Delijianis’ of the Los Angeles, Palace, State and Tower Theaters, and Gene Scott’s of the United Artists Theatre were part of a wave of theater purchases in the mid to late 1980s. During this time the Downtown Management Company, headed by Joseph Hellen, also purchased many properties near Fifth and South Broadway, including the Roxie, Cameo, and Arcade Theatres, as well as the Broadway-Spring Arcade. For these property owners, navigating the district’s historic designation would prove complicated – development was restricted in order to protect the district’s historic features, making costs to renovate prohibitive.

Along with ensuring preservation of the district’s material structures, historic designation also sought to lend legitimacy to properly historic entertainment mediums and/ or moviegoing practices. The period of moviegoing that is emphasized in the efforts to return the Broadway theaters to their “original” states is the 1920s. Being a decade of rapid economic growth for the country and for cinema, the 1920s saw a high number of opening nights for motion picture theaters. As Janna Jones observes in the case of the Southern movie palace, material preservation and opening nights are powerfully connected, “the only past that gets remembered at a movie palace is the same past that is materially preserved – the rather unproblematic opening night and the happy years that followed.”

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