The Figueroa Theatre stood at the southwest corner of Figueroa St and what was then called Santa Barbara Ave but what we know these days as Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. It was one of those grand movie palaces with nearly 1500 seats. This photo was taken in late 1925 during the run of its first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s rather weird tale of reincarnation, “The Road to Yesterday.” You have to wonder how it went with such stiff competition as MGM’s overwhelmingly successful “The Big Parade”, the original “Ben-Hur”, the original “The Phantom of the Opera,” and Erich von Stroheim’s “The Merry Widow.” It’s a shame that the Figueroa didn’t survive today—the photos below show how they-don’t-make-’em-like-that-anymore the interior was:
What that corner looked like in February 2019:
This theater was still there in the 1950’s when I was a student at USC.
That sounds right – the place was demolished in the late 1960s