by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It only existed for about a quarter-century, but the theater that stood on the east side of Spring Street north of 4th Street and just above the still-standing Herman W. Hellman Building, from 1903 to about 1929 may have had the most diverse career under the most monikers of any venue in Los Angeles history.
The highlighted artifact from the Museum’s holdings for this post is a program for the week of 9 September 1912 for what was then the Empress, operated by the team of Big Tim Sullivan and John W. Considine, which operated a large chain of theatres of that name throughout the country though massive changes would soon be afoot. Before we turn through the pages of the publication, we’ll take a bit of a look back.
As has been pointed out here before, the Angel City’s stratospheric growth from the late 1880s through the end of the Roaring Twenties included so many transformative elements and entertainment and venues for them were certainly very important. The first true theater constructed in town was the Temple Theatre, situated on the upper floor of Jonathan Temple’s Market House and which opened in 1860 after the building, which failed as a commercial structure during a dour economy, became city hall and would soon be the court house.
The next major innovation in Los Angeles venues was the Merced Theatre, built in 1870 by William Abbott and named for his wife next door to the recently erected Pico House hotel (the structures had a connecting passage for guests of the latter). The Turnverein Germania, built on Spring Street by a German benevolent society, also offered a space for live performance as did Stearns Hall, which stood about where U.S. 101 meets Los Angeles Street today.
In the 1880s, which included a major boom when William H. Workman was mayor in 1887 and 1888, larger and more ornate venues were built, such as Childs’ Opera House (later the Grand Opera House) and Hazard’s Pavilion (the latter across 5th Street from 6th Street Park, now Pershing Square). As the 19th century segued into the 20th, more important theaters were built, such as the Burbank, the several Orpheums and the first Pantages, among others.
The Empress began life in 1903 as the Casino Theatre, operated by Jacob Waldeck with the unusual addition of an “Eden Musee,” a display area filled with wax statues and sculpture modeled after one that was a big hit in New York City at the time. In July, the contract was let for the construction of the single-story brick edifice, designed by the well-known architect Abraham M. Edelman and the amount paid to contractor Earl F. Low being not far north of $23,000.
The 12 October issue of the Los Angeles Times provided some notable detail about the venue as a carload plus of wax figures arrived, as did “a corps of artists, modelers and sculptors” to ready the life-size figures which were “representations . . . of eminent men, a group of the world’s rulers, and statuary groups.” When everything was readied, Waldeck and his partners promised the “musee” to be “one of the most original and complete establishments of its kind on the Pacific Coast,” prefiguring (ahem!) such later examples as Madame Tussaud’s, the Hollywood Wax Museum and the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park.
The paper went on to note that
The auditorium of the new house ill be 60 by 72 feet in size, and will seat comfortably 1200 persons. There will be one balcony and six boxes, all of these on the lower floor . . . The dimensions of the stage are even larger than the Orpheum, being 27 feet deep, with a width of 60 feet. There will be facilities for the latest contrivances and manipulations in the realm of stageland . . . and the house will at least not want for mechanical means wherewith to produce effects.
The Casino theater will be run principally with vaudeville entertainment, but it is the idea of Manager Waldeck to branch out into other things as soon as he finds opportunity and time.
Specifically, what the German-born impresario and former Orpheum treasurer had in mind was the introduction of comic, or light, opera, which the Times believed, if well operated, “would be almost sure to pay.” The 21 December edition of the Los Angeles Record covered that day’s opening and reported that “society was out in full force” while declaring that the Casino “is a dainty, cosy [sic] little house which will seat about 1800 people,” and added that the only negative was “the crowding of too many seats in a small space,” though that clearly was to maximize receipts and profit.
The paper recorded that the opening piece “started off in bad shape and it began to look as if the first night would prove a dismal failure,” but “a trio of comedians of the rough-and-tumble variety” hit the stage and rallied the crowd. It was commented that “during the rest of the performance there was a laugh every second, while a rendition of “Antony and Cleopatra” was praised. The Record concluded that “the Casino is to be the home of burlesque and if the first week’s production is a sample of the rest, ought to prove a popular house.”
The problem was that it was not successful enough and was not “sure to pay.” Waldeck drowned in debt and was found incoherent in a mental breakdown in a canyon near Santa Monica, dying shortly afterward. Theater chain owner and lawyer Alfred J. Morganstern, but longtime operator Henry C. Wyatt and the Burbank’s operator, Oliver Morosco, who later built a significant empire, obtained a lease, but accepted a handsome payment to yield and Morganstern took over.
His tenure was more than rocky and support from a San Francisco oil heiress dried up among controversy and the venue was renamed for property owner Mary A. Hotchkiss, who gave the lease to her nephew T. Jeff White III, whose grandfather was Dr. Thomas Jefferson White, former owner of the Old Mill of Mission San Gabriel, and whose uncle-in-law was Col. Edward J.C. Kewen, subject of a recent post here. White, whose mother was Hotchkiss’ sister, was adopted by her and her wealthy attorney husband, Albert, but he blew through his share of his inheritance from his grandfather.
In July 1906, White suddenly “severed” his ties and, notably, Mary Hotchkiss declined to talk to the press about it, though he returned soon as treasurer. The following year, he ran off to San Diego with another woman, leaving his wife and young daughter in Los Angeles, and this led to divorce and child custody proceedings that were routinely covered by the local media and aired no small amount of dirty laundry about White’s behavior.
Consequently, he and Hotchkiss, recently married for a fourth time and known as Mary Jauch, lost custody of the child to the young one’s mother’s aunt. When she died in 1934, Jauch left the girl, Amma White Styres, a hotel property on Olive Street and $500 a month, while Jeff White merely received $75 a month. Five acres in Santa Monica, where Jauch long resided, was given to the city for what is now Hotchkiss Park—a house purchased by her and second husband David Mooney in the mid-Eighties burned in 1903 with White suspiciously having his belonging neatly packed in trunks he carted out after he and his friends had a riotous party when the fire burst forth.
Jeff White, who worked as a hotel clerk in Los Angeles and San Bernardino in his later years before settling in a rental on the Strand in Ocean Park, died in April 1937 at age 61. His daughter, who was married three times and apparently had no children, died at age 99 in 2001. One wonders if she was able to live off her inheritance for much of her adult life.
Meanwhile, in 1907, there was another name change to the theater, which became the Los Angeles (the older venue of that name became the first Orpheum and the current Los Angeles, still another theater, opened in 1931 and is still with us.) When the venue, leased by the Northwestern Theatrical Association, reopened in August, it was with some major changes, with a new entrance and the older one enclosed for a cloak room, smoking room and containing phone booths, while new stairs were added for balcony access.
In the auditorium, new loge boxes were constructed at the lower level and emergency exits added so that the Los Angeles Herald of the 29th reported that the Los Angeles was “declared to be one of the safest [theaters] in the city.” Also of note was a new color palette of ivory, gold and olive green and “in place of the unsightly advertising curtain,” these being very common, “the theater will have a plain one for the present, until a handsome drop curtain can be brought here from the east.” Significantly, the opening performance was the comic opera, produced by a San Francisco company, Dolly Varden.
The Herald of 17 May 1908 reported that Sullivan and Considine, operators of some fifty theaters and who for under a year in 1907-1908, controlled the Peoples’ Theater, built a couple of years earlier as the Novelty, on Main between 5th and 6th streets, were leasing the Los Angeles. The venue, to be remodeled again, including the addition of a gallery, and, after work was completed, it reopened on 31 August using the catchphrase of “Fashionable Vaudeville” for its thrice-daily shows of seven acts each to counter the Orpheum’s promotion of “Advanced Vaudeville.”
For the next four years, Sullivan and Considine provided the most stable management to date of what seemed to some media reports as an ill-starred venue. The two had interesting paths to get to “legitimate” operations in the vaudeville theatrical world. Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan was born in 1862 to poor Irish immigrants in the rough Five Points section in lower Manhattan in New York City. Amid an unstable family life, he became a “newsie,” hawking papers at age 8, but, within a decade, ran an operation to distribute five sheets and, at 21, purchased a bar associated with an Irish gang tied to the infamous Tammany Hall political machine.
Sullivan rose to be a key member in delivering reliable Democratic Party voters, often more than one vote per person, while roughing up Republicans who didn’t fall in line by sitting out elections when ordered. “Big Tim,” who was taller and broader than average certainly helping with his role, was rewarded with a seat in the New York Assembly at age 24 and, after eight years, to the Senate. He leavened his corruption with plenty of philanthropy to his district, as well as patronage to loyal Tammany Hall boys, this last involving tithing in the form of kickbacks, not to mention those from businesses to evade Sunday closure laws.
In addition to his illicit income, said to be in excess of $100,000 annually, Sullivan invested in theaters, amusement parks and, with William Fox, early movie houses. Early in the 20th century, he won a seat in the House of Representatives and served two terms, though the lack of graft and his lowly place as a back-bencher led him to return to the state senate. With respect to the theaters, this brought the partnership with Considine.
Considine was from the nation’s second largest city and perhaps second only in corruption to the Big Apple, this being Chicago, where he was born in 1863, also to Irish immigrants. Unlike his future partner, however, Considine was well-educated, though he dropped out of college to pursue a career as a stage actor. Also a sizable figure in height and weight, Considine settled in Seattle in 1889 and, while, like T. Jeff White, he abandoned a first wife and daughter, he got his break running a “box house” that was a theater, but also provided plenty of liquor, gambling and prostitution.
What distinguished his operation was that he replaced the actor/server/prostitute model with one in which good performers stuck to the stage, while the servers continued their dual work dispensing food and drink and further satisfying male customers in the small rooms inside the venue. Despite his dapper and debonair demeanor and style, Considine had no scruples in using violence to get his way, but a reform movement in the mid-1890s forced him to decamp to Spokane for a few years and he continued his “box house” operation.
With the discovery of gold in the Yukon, Seattle’s reform project quickly melted away and Considine returned to his operation and rode the wave of prosperity. A former partner and deputy sheriff, Thomas Meredith turned against him when he became police chief, but when corruption charges fomented by Considine led to his resignation, Meredith came looking for his foe with several weapons and, in a fight that resulted, the former killed the latter, though he was acquitted on a murder rap.
The incident seems to have convinced Considine it was time to go clean and quickly amassed a small chain of legitimate theaters in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada. A member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the impresario traveled to the association’s national convention in New York City in 1906 and met Sullivan. The result was the Sullivan & Considine Circuit, with the former providing the funds and the latter handling the business work and they rapidly developed a portfolio of more than three dozen venues, while developing partnerships with independent theater owners like Marcus Loew.
A Seattle rival emerged during this first decade of the century: Alexander Pantages, who also came up in the Yukon era with less-than-sterling business operations, as has been discussed here before. Considine and Sullivan soon came down to Los Angeles to break into the growing city’s maturing theatrical realm and Pantages wasn’t too far behind and opened his first Angel City venue in 1910.
With that, we’ll stop here and return tomorrow with part two, so join us then!