Yesterday, I was checking the weather — we've been having weather lately in Los Angeles for a change — and I noticed something odd on a map over at Wunderground, which is my weather source of choice. This is a hunk of a map they have that includes my area and as you can see, they note certain areas and landmarks…like the Beverly Center and the Pan Pacific Park. Prominently noted there also is the Carthay Circle Theater and it struck me as odd for two reasons that someone would select that, of all the identifiers they could select…
- True, there's a lot of history associated with the Carthay Circle. It was built in 1926 and housed a number of important movies. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937 and it was at one point regarded as one of the great architectural achievements of Southern California. But there are a lot of theaters in Los Angeles and most of them had some great premiere or presentation…why single out the Carthay Circle? And there's another reason it's odd that it's on this map…
- It isn't there anymore. It was torn down in 1969.
There is no Carthay Circle Theater…there. There's a small replica at Disney World in Florida but the one the map is pinpointing is long gone. There's an office building where it used to be. As I wrote back here, my parents took me there maybe a half-dozen times in the sixties. I have a vague memory that we saw Around the World in Eighty Days there not when it first premiered at the Carthay Circle — in '56 when I was four years old — but a few years later in some kind of return engagement. I think we also saw West Side Story there…and others I cannot identify.
It was a great place but I'm curious why it's still a landmark, four decades after it stopped being there. I guess it has something to do with cartographers constantly taking information off old maps as they make new ones…and sometimes, something doesn't get updated. Or maybe there's some mapmaker who always loved the place. He first kissed a girl in the balcony (I think the place had a balcony) or while sitting alone in the loge, he first fell in love with Hayley Mills. I think that's where I did.
They took a wrecking ball to his beloved movie shrine but they cannot erase it from his heart and memory. So every time he whips up a map of that area, he puts it in. It's his way of screaming to the world, "No! You will not deny what I know in my heart! You say there is no more Carthay Circle Theater! I say there is and there shall forever be!"
Or something like that. The thing is, it probably doesn't still exist only on this map on the weather site. They didn't design this map. They got it from somewhere and as you can see, it does have Pan Pacific Park and the Beverly Center, both of which were built in the eighties. So it's a map someone was maintaining and using and it wouldn't surprise me if there are others that have the Carthay Circle Theater on them.
Almost all the restaurant guides and address search engines like Yelp! and Superpages still list a restaurant called Andre's of Beverly Hills at 8635 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills despite the fact that it went out of business in the late seventies. 8635 Wilshire is not far from where the Carthay Circle Theater was. A lot of people probably used to dine at Andre's and then go catch a movie at the Carthay Circle. Apparently, in some database somewhere, they still can.