Carthay Square, Los Angeles
Carthay Square, Los Angeles, California, is home to one of the oldest, most historic theaters in the country, the Hollywood Pantages. Since 1926, the Hollywood Pantages has presented everything from vaudeville and motion pictures to Broadway shows and concerts. Today, the Pantages is a leading performing arts venue, offering year-round entertainment and attracting tens of thousands of visitors each year.
It is located in downtown Los Angeles and opened as a luxury theater and dining room on Dec. 26, 1922. The theater was built through the vision of theatre impresario Sid Grauman, who envisioned a theater that would attract an audience of “refined tastes” and was “as good as any in Europe.” Grauman wanted the theater to be home to the finest shows on Broadway, and many shows premiered at Carthay Circle. The theater hosted the first performances by many Broadway legends, including Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. It saw the premiere of many musical comedies and was known as “the crown jewel of the Broadway circuit.”
Carthay Square is a shopping mall located in the middle of Los Angeles. It is a two-story shopping mall, with shops on both floors. The mall has a red brick facade. It is at the corner of shopping streets, where the Hills meets the West Side. The location of the shopping mall is at the intersection of Wilshire Blvd and San Vicente Blvd. The shopping center is adjacent to the Beverly Hills City Hall, the Beverly Hills Police Department Headquarters, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Carthay Circle Theatre was originally built and owned by Howard Hughes in 1927, who purchased the land and deed to the theater in 1923, while it was still under construction. Hughes hired noted theatre architect B. Marcus Priteca to design the theater to resemble the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and named it the “Carthay Circle”, in honor of the famous mansion in San Marino that once belonged to 19th-century entrepreneur and business tycoon, Henry R. Pancoast, which was named the “Carthay Villa”. The first film screened at the Carthay Circle Theatre was the silent movie Ben-Hur, on November 18, 1926. The first movie with sound played at the theater was the musical comedy The Jazz Singer.
The history of the area of Carthay Square, Los Angeles includes the ancient shoreline, the Tongva village of Siwu, the Rancho Las Cienegas, the Los Angeles Country Club, the streets of Carthay, the Carthay Center and its shopping mall, the Carthay Circle Theater, and the Carthay Vista condominiums. Carthay Circle, located on the south side of Wilshire Blvd. just west of Fairfax Ave., is an approximately seven-block-long semi-circular area surrounding the intersection of Wilshire Blvd. and San Vicente Blvd. The name of the street was taken from the famous Carthage, the ancient Phoenician city-state, located in modern Tunisia.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall of Carthay Square is a concert hall in Los Angeles, California, which opened on October 23, 2003, and is the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It is located across the street from L.A. Live. The hall seats 2,265 people and is the third hall to bear the Disney name. The hall was conceived as part of a revitalization plan for the neighborhood and funded by the Walt Disney Company. It was built below street level to reduce the visible profile.
Carthay Circle is a planned community in the city of Los Angeles, California. It was built by Del Webb Construction in the early-to-mid 1950s. The circle is in the middle of the community and represents the “car of tomorrow” – the circular road around the circle is the conceptual car’s wheel. Carthay Circle is one of the few remaining mid-century modern planned communities in the United States. It is in the North Carthay neighborhood, within the Central Los Angeles region.