All 12 of Broadway's Movie Palaces, Ranked by How You Get In

The only one you can walk into free, six days a week, is the Apple Store inside the 1927 Tower Theatre.

The easiest of downtown's twelve surviving movie palaces to get inside is an Apple Store. The Tower Theatre at 802 S. Broadway went up as S. Charles Lee's first commission and the first film house in Los Angeles wired for talking pictures, and these days it sells laptops. Apple's own store page posts 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 10 to 7 on the Sunday we checked. There's no ticket, no booking, no event and no cover.

That's the test this list runs on, and it's a narrow one: not which room is grandest, but what you have to do to stand inside it this month. We read the Los Angeles Conservancy's entry on each of the twelve theatres in the Broadway district, counted the dated events the working houses publish on their own calendars, and priced the one behind-the-scenes tour with tickets still on sale. Four of the twelve are behind a retail counter. Only one of those four has lost its auditorium outright.

The district is the reason any of this is a list and not a sentence. The National Park Service put the Broadway Theater and Commercial District on the National Register in 1979 and expanded it in 2002; twelve theatres built between 1910 and 1931 still stand across roughly seven blocks of South Broadway, and the city's tourism board calls it the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the country. Seven blocks, twelve rooms, and no two of them let you in the same way.

1. Tower Theatre, 802 S. Broadway — 900 seats, and the only door that opens on a Tuesday afternoon

First, and we know what we just did. The Tower opened in 1927, and Lee fit 900 seats and ground-floor retail onto a tiny corner lot; the Conservancy's entry on the building records it as the first film house in Los Angeles wired for talking pictures. The restoration that came with the store took in seismic work, a rebuilt clock tower, the glazed terra-cotta cladding, the marquees on Broadway and Eighth, and the interior marble, plaster and decorative painting, and the store opened in June 2021; the Conservancy gave the project a Preservation Award in 2022. Apple posts the hours, and they're the loosest on the street.

Yes, we ranked a phone store above three working theatres, and the argument is welcome. The objection is fair and it's this: walking under a restored dome to look at a charging cable isn't going to the movies, and the room is a sales floor now, not an auditorium. Granted. But this ranking asks one question, and on that question the Tower is unbeatable — it is the only one of the twelve where the answer to “can I see it this afternoon?” is yes, for nothing, without a date on a calendar. Every other palace on this street makes you wait for someone else's schedule.

2. Orpheum Theatre, 842 S. Broadway — a dozen dated shows and a Wurlitzer that still works

The fullest five weeks on the block. We counted twelve dated events on the Orpheum's own calendar between Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, among them the Wallflowers on the 13th, Chelsea Wolfe on the 23rd, George Lopez on the 24th and Gary Clark Jr. on the 26th; the same page runs 18 dates out to March. G. Albert Lansburgh's room opened in February 1926, and the Style 240 Special Wurlitzer installed in 1928 is still in it — restored during the 2001 renovation and, per the Conservancy, still played for silent films. The Conservancy also holds an easement over the exterior, the historic signage, the entrance lobby and the main theatre.

Second rather than first because every one of those twelve dates costs money, happens once, and sells out if it's any good.

3. The United Theater on Broadway, 929 S. Broadway — the one that still shows movies

C. Howard Crane designed more than 250 theatres and this 1,600-seat room, opened in 1927, was his only one on the West Coast, built as United Artists' West Coast flagship under a 13-story office tower by Walker & Eisen. It served as a church's headquarters until 2011 and reopened as a theatre on Feb. 14, 2014. Its own calendar has a Clue and Rocky Horror Picture Show double feature on Oct. 10, Jim Henson's Labyrinth in concert on Oct. 24, and Hercules vs. Vampires on Oct. 30 and 31. That makes it the only palace on Broadway with a film on a published calendar this month, and it has four of them in three weeks.

Third on the count alone: nine dated events in the same five-week window against the Orpheum's twelve. On every other test it wins, and this one is close. If what you want is a 1927 auditorium with a film running in it, this is the only address on Broadway, and Oct. 10 is the date. We wrote about the building's relaunch and the rest of the corridor's revival in August.

4. Million Dollar Theatre, 307 S. Broadway — 2,345 seats, one Saturday, one slot left

Sid Grauman's first Los Angeles house. It opened Feb. 1, 1918 with 2,345 seats and the premiere of The Silent Man, to a design by Albert C. Martin Sr. and William Lee Woollett, and the Conservancy's entry has it back in public use since 2018 under owners who bought it in 2017. The way in is dated: the Conservancy is running a behind-the-scenes tour on Saturday, Oct. 17 that runs 50 to 60 minutes, costs $20 for members, caps at four tickets and involves several flights of stairs. The 11 a.m. tour has sold out. The 5 p.m. still had room when we checked.

Fourth because that's one afternoon. After Oct. 17 the room goes back to private events, and the next public date isn't posted.

5. Globe Theatre, 744 S. Broadway — the 1913 Morosco, running as a nightclub

The oldest room on this list opened as a legitimate playhouse in 1913, designed by Morgan, Walls & Morgan with interiors by Alfred F. Rosenheim, and it has had the strangest career of the twelve. After it closed in the 1980s the lobby became retail and the auditorium became a nightclub; the Conservancy has it renovated and reopened as a nightclub and live-entertainment venue, which is what it still is. Ticketed shows land there regularly — Loe Shimmy played it on Sept. 18 — but they arrive promoter by promoter rather than on a season.

Fifth because a room that books a month at a time is a room you can get into, just not on a date you choose.

6. Palace Theatre, 630 S. Broadway — the oldest original Orpheum left in America

Lansburgh's other Broadway house, and the older one: it opened in 1911 as the Orpheum circuit's third Los Angeles theatre, which makes it the oldest surviving original Orpheum in the United States. The Conservancy's entry names Houdini among the acts it played in the vaudeville era. It held about 2,000 seats then and holds around 1,000 now, and it has been restored to the point where podcasts, comedy tapings and concerts book it.

Sixth because the booking is always somebody else's. The Palace has no standing calendar of its own to check; you find out it's open because a comedian you follow announces a date there.

7. State Theatre, 703 S. Broadway — 2,450 seats, and a congregation has them

The largest auditorium in the district, by Weeks & Day, opened in 1921 and built for Loew's. It went dark in the 1990s and reopened in the mid-2000s as a church, which it remains. Nobody checks a ticket at the door, and the doors open every week, which is more than the five below it can say.

Seventh anyway, because what's happening inside is a worship service. The congregation isn't running tours and doesn't publish its room as an attraction, and a ranking about getting in shouldn't send strangers to the back of a service to look at the plasterwork.

8. Los Angeles Theatre, 615 S. Broadway — the grandest of the twelve, and the hardest to be a civilian in

The last movie palace built on Broadway and, by the Conservancy's reckoning, the most lavish of them: S. Charles Lee with S. Tilden Norton, French Baroque, 1931, built for a sum estimated above a million dollars. It is also, by the Conservancy's own account, a popular filming and special-event location — which is a polite way of saying the gates in the photograph above come up for a camera crew or a wedding and not for you. Its inlaid terrazzo forecourt is free to stand on, and for most people that sidewalk is as close as they get.

Eighth because the realistic way in is a walking tour that can't promise it, or a June screening (see below). Grandeur doesn't move you up a list about doors.

9. Cameo Theatre, 528 S. Broadway — the raked floor is still under the stockroom

It opened in October 1910 as Clune's Broadway, one of the first theatres in the country purpose-built to show movies, 900 seats to Rosenheim's design, and it ran continuously longer than any other theatre in Los Angeles before closing in 1991. A retail electronics store has the front now, and the auditorium is storage — but the Conservancy records that it keeps “its original raked (sloped) floor, decorative walls, ceiling, and screen.” There is a 1910 movie screen behind that shop, and inventory in front of it.

10. Roxie Theatre, 518 S. Broadway — the last one built, and the only Art Deco house downtown

John M. Cooper's 1,600-seat Roxie went up in 1931 and was the last theatre ever built on Broadway; it's also the only one downtown done in Art Deco rather than a revival style. The lobby was cut up for retail in the late 1980s. The auditorium is still structurally there, and it has water damage and disuse to show for the decades since. Tenth rather than ninth because the Cameo's room is at least dry.

11. Arcade Theatre, 534 S. Broadway — it opened as a Pantages

It opened in 1910 as the Pantages, by Morgan & Walls, with 1,400 seats that a later remodel cut to 850. The lobby went retail in 1993, and it has stayed that way through every wave of Broadway's revival since. Eleventh because the Conservancy's entry doesn't record what shape the auditorium is in, and a room nobody will describe is a room you can't plan around.

12. Rialto Theatre, 812 S. Broadway — there's nothing left to get into

Last, and the record puts it there. The Rialto opened May 21, 1917, by William Lee Woollett and Oliver P. Dennis, and its auditorium was gutted — not subdivided, not shuttered, gutted — with the lobby turned over to retail. It's the only one of the twelve where the thing being ranked no longer exists. The Conservancy's entry on it ends with Urban Outfitters announcing rehabilitation plans in 2013, and says nothing about what became of them.

The one ticket that covers the whole block

If you want more than one of these in an afternoon, the Conservancy sells the only product that does it. Curtains Up on Broadway runs Saturdays at 10 a.m., costs $25 general and $18 for members and anyone 17 or under, and covers about a mile and a half in roughly two hours and 45 minutes. It names ten of the twelve on its route — the Tower, Million Dollar, Orpheum, Rialto, Arcade, Cameo, Globe, State, Palace and Roxie — and it promises “Exteriors and Interiors (subject to availability)” — with the caveat stated plainly on the listing: which theatres open on a given Saturday can't be guaranteed in advance. Most of them have no elevator to the balcony or the basement either.

The other way in is seasonal. The Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats puts classic films back on these screens in June — this year it ran L.A. Confidential and a Mary Poppins sing-along in the Los Angeles Theatre on the same Saturday, with pre-show tours at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. That's eight months away.

The Million Dollar tour is Oct. 17 at 5 p.m., and that one still had seats.