In February 2013, I visited the former site of the Kim Sing Theatre at the intersection of North Figueroa Street and Alpine Street. Thirteen years earlier Willard Ford, the son of actor Harrison Ford, purchased the structure that contained Kim Sing Theatre for $300,000.[i] According to Ford’s account, the theater had been abandoned and neglected for around sixteen years before he noticed it while on a bike ride in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and decided he had to buy it. While stories about Ford’s purchase, or his recent posting of the property to the real estate market,[iii] regularly include the year of the building's construction in 1926 and its initial purpose as a vaudeville theater, accounts in popular media rarely (if ever) explore the multiple identities the theater had in the time between its opening and its state of disuse, a time span of more than fifty-five years. Matching the changing demographics of the location’s surrounding community, before the theater screened Chinese-language films as the Kim Sing Theatre, it was the Carmen Theater, screening Spanish-language films. Before that it was the Alpine Theatre, the name it had when it opened as a vaudeville theater. [iv] While little information is available about the theater’s stint as the Carmen Theater, its name conjures Latin American star Carmen Miranda as well as the 'first queen of the movies,' the Spanish dancer Carmencita who starred in an 1894 Edison film.[v] The fact that the Carmen theater screened Spanish-language films, and later the Kim Sing Theatre Chinese-language films, hints at its role in constructing a “parallel film culture” between the U.S. and Mexico, perhaps demonstrating as Laura Serna suggests “how moviegoing could strengthen rather than weaken attachments to home countries” (11).
[i] (footnote one of the press things – LA Times? 5/23/14)
[iii] See Bianca Barragan, “Buy Chinatown’s 1926 Live/Work Kim Sing Theatre For $4.5MM.”
Curbed Los Angeles. March 3, 2014 for one report on the property’s posting to the market.
[iv] [
Return to this footnote later] I have not yet been able to identify the exact years of these name changes. While information on Cinema Treasures (“Your guide to movie theaters,” a crowd sourced repository of information about vintage and contemporary movie theaters) suggests that the Alpine Theatre was renamed the Carmen Theatre in 1939, [
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2041 but blogger (what’s the name??) writes in a 2010 post about Kim Sing Theatre and Chinatown, that the theater became the Carmen Theatre in 1941 <not sure which of these says that, need to check: http://losangelesrevisited.blogspot.com/p/kim-sing-theater-and-las-chinatown.html OR
http://losangelesrevisited.blogspot.com/2010/09/kim-sing-theater.html>. <I would like to check, but can’t get distracted. I have this AIN number, but I think it’s wrong because it’s for 712 N. Figueroa, not 718 N. Figueroa AIN 5407-005-016>
[v]. Carmencita (1894). Dir. William Heise. From National Archives and Records Administration; Available at Wikimedia Commons (Uploaded May 2011).
[vi] Flagship is described as “a multi-interest fashion, design, and athletics marketing, public relations, wholesale representation, and brand development company” in a post to “LA I’m Yours” from Mar 4, 2013.
