State Theatre​

 

Street Address: 

703 S. Broadway

Los Angeles, CA 90014

​

 

The Loew’s State Theatre (today’s State Theatre) opened on November 12, 1921 with a vaudeville show and the premiere of the film A Trip to Paradise.

​

The State Theatre is a twelve-story Beaux Art style structure with a brick façade – one of the largest brick-clad buildings in the city – with terra cotta ornamentation at the lower levels. Designed by Weeks & Day, the theatre originally had two marquees, one for the Broadway entrance and another for its 7th Street entrance. However, only the Broadway marquee remains.

​

The interior design of the theatre references a Spanish castle with distressed stencil work on the plaster ceilings of lobby and auditorium appearing as wood. A similar method was used to give the lobby’s walls a look of a castle’s ancient stonework. Virtually square, the auditorium seats 2,450 below a highly ornamented, geometrically arranged ceiling; from which a large chandelier is suspended.

​

As an MGM theatre (Marcus Loew co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924), and with its strategic Broadway and Seventh Street corner location intersected by busy streetcars, the State Theatre was a consistent money-maker.

​

In the 1930s, the theatre changed ownership and the outside entrance on Broadway was changed to the current Greco-roman style and the 7th street marquee was removed.

By the 1960s, the theatre was showing first-run Spanish language films. The theatre closed its doors in the 1990s, reopening in the mid-2000s as the Universal Church of Christ.

​

​

*information taken from Los Angeles Conservancy

​

Capacity: 2,350

​

To contact the original website, visit State Theatre. Fortunately, in our quest for finding information on booking, the website appeared through a Google Search. The website would benefit from a modern design update, but information is easy to obtain, which is what ultimately matters. Unify Broadway hopes to build a stronger relationship among the theatres by placing them on a single website for potential renters to sift and shop through.