Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith built themselves a cathedral - literally modeled on one - to premiere their own films. The United Theater on Broadway at 929 South Broadway opened on December 26, 1927 with Pickford's My Best Girl, the flagship of the United Artists theater circuit. Architect C. Howard Crane - his only West Coast design - delivered a Spanish Gothic movie palace inspired by the castles and cathedrals Pickford and Fairbanks saw honeymooning in Spain, patterned after Segovia Cathedral, fronted by a 13-story office tower that was briefly the tallest building in Los Angeles. The auditorium originally seated 2,214 under a vaulted ceiling with a famous mirrored dome, and ran as a premiere house and first-run cinema for six decades before closing as a film theater in 1989. The saving grace was a church: televangelist Dr. Gene Scott's Los Angeles University Cathedral occupied the building from 1989, whose volunteers scrubbed decades of smoke stains from the interior and kept the palace intact while Broadway's other theaters decayed. The Ace Hotel took the property in 2012, converted the tower to a hotel and reopened the theater on February 14, 2014 as the Theatre at Ace Hotel - a decade-long run of concerts, film premieres, television tapings and performance art that made the room a downtown cultural fixture. When Ace exited at the end of January 2024, the theater rebranded as the United Theater on Broadway with the same operating team in place, seating about 1,600 for its current mix of concerts, screenings and special events. Nearly a century after the artists took control of their own distribution, their theater still runs shows nightly - the grandest survivor of the Broadway Theater District's movie-palace row. The interior remains the spectacle it was built to be - the vaulted ceiling, the mirrored dome that scatters light like a jewel box, murals of the founding artists worked into the ornament - and preservationists count the room among the finest surviving movie palaces in the country, still doing nightly the job it was designed for in 1927.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 929 South Broadway, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90015

Website: https://theunitedtheater.com

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 1600

Opening Date: 26/12/1927

Accessible