“The cinema is an invention without any future.” – Louis Lumiere

In some ways it’s hard to envision what life might have been like 117 years ago – We’ve all grown up in a world with mass entertainment systems of radio, television and movies. But in another way, the incredible upheaval of technology we’re living through today looks in very much the massive industrialized shift of the early 1900s. Gone were the agrarian days – in was a future of densely packed cities with towers scraping the sky.

And so 117 years ago, a proprietor of arcades and phonograph parlors named of Thomas Lincoln Tally took a gamble and built the world’s first purposely built “movie” theater – other movie theaters had existed before, but they were always renovations of existing buildings.

Built on 262 S. Main in Los Angeles California, Tally’s Electric Theater’s opening is sometimes cited as April 16. The Theater itself was open from 7:30 to 10:30 PM but the demand for the screenings was so high that Tally had to add matinees. Even charging an exorbitant price of 10 cents (about $3 in 2018 dollars – hey that’s still a bargain!), Tally’s success with the movie business led to a wave of movie theater construction from 3000 in the US by 1907 to 10,000 by 1910.

Thomas Lincoln Tally would later team up with John D. Williams and create a distribution company called First National Pictures which would ultimately be incorporated in Warner Bros.

As for the fate of Tally’s Electric Theater? Well the initial success didn’t last forever as it was shut down and turned into a vaudeville theater in 1903 called the Lyric Theater.

By 1910 it was known as Glockner’s Automatic Theater with a directory listing for Automatic Theatre.

The Glockner closed in 1930 and was replaced by a hardware store. The entire building was eventually demolished in 1998 to make way for a Cal Trans Parking Garage.

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