Venue: Broadway Theater District
Town: Los Angeles, US

Broadway Theater District, referred to as Broadway Theater and Commercial District in the National Register of Historic Places and Broadway Theater and Entertainment District by the City of Los Angeles Planning Department, is a historic theater district located on Broadway in the historic core of downtown Los Angeles. The district, the first and largest theater district listed on the National Register of Historic Places, contains twelve movie palaces along an eight-block stretch and is the only large concentration of movie palaces left in the United States. The district along with an adjacent section of Seventh Street was also Los Angeles's retail hub for the first half of the twentieth century. Los Angeles's Broadway Theater District stretches for eight blocks from Second Street to Olympic Boulevard along South Broadway in the historic core of downtown Los Angeles. These blocks contain twelve theaters built between 1910 and 1931 and numerous department store buildings, the latter of which made the area the shopping center of greater Los Angeles for much of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1986, Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith called the district "the only large concentration of vintage movie theaters left in America." The district's oldest surviving theater was built in 1910, and by 1931, the district had the highest concentration of cinemas in the world, with seating capacity for more than 15,000 patrons. At the time, Broadway was the hub of L.A.'s entertainment scene - a place where "screen goddesses and guys in fedoras rubbed elbows with Army nurses and aircraft pioneers." In 2006, the Los Angeles Times wrote:"There was a time, long ago, when the streets of downtown Los Angeles were awash in neon-thanks to a confluence of movie theaters the world had never seen before. Dozens of theaters screened Hollywood's latest fare, played host to star-studded premieres and were filled nightly with thousands of moviegoers. In those days, before World War I