Lincoln Theatre

Lincoln Theatre. . , West Coast Apollo , When the Lincoln Theatre opened on South Central Avenue at 23rd Street in 1927 , resplendent, at a cost of $500,000, with Moorish Revival architecture, a 25-foot-wide marque, a big stage, an orchestra pit, and seating for 2,100 , it quickly garnered the nickname “West Coast Apollo.” Indeed, Harlem's famed Apollo Theater and the Lincoln presented many of the same stellar acts. , The Lincoln's opening night featured Curtis Mosby's Dixieland Blue Blowers orchestra and the silent movie Rose of the Golden West, starring Mary Astor and Gilbert Roland. Throughout its 35-year run, the Lincoln offered motion pictures, stage shows, talent shows, and vaudeville. It was among the West Coast's first theaters for African Americans, who were barred from the movie palaces or relegated to “colored only” seating sections in downtown Los Angeles. , Bardu Ali, a New Orleans jazz and R&B singer, was the Lincoln's nightly master of ceremonies and performed with his band from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Many entertainers of note graced its stage: Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Fats Domino, Sammy Davis Jr., and B.B. King. , Live Music and Theater , "The Lincoln Theatre was a big-time place for the blacks in town," said Marshal Royal, a clarinetist and saxophonist who played with Count Basie. "You couldn't get into that place on Saturdays and Sundays." The Lincoln attracted white patrons as well as black. In May 1928, a Los Angeles Times columnist wrote that “many white people crowded in, too, because the chance to see negro actors of real ability appearing for their own people rather than appearing as negroes from the white man's point of view is one that doesn't come to one in every city.” , The theater's resident company, known as the Lafayette Players, put on dramatic and comedic shows. The 1928 production of Rain, starring Evelyn Preer, attracted to the audience such cinematic luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg, Janet Gaynot, and Fanny Brice. , In 1935, famed entertainer Jack Benny served as emcee at a glittering fundraiser held at the Lincoln to support the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's campaign for passage of a federal anti-lynching bill. , Among other notables who participated in the event were screen legends Jimmy Cagney and Marlene Dietrich, director Frank Capra, and Lionel Hampton's Orchestra. Challenged by Southern states, the bill died without a vote, despite the ardent support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1940s, the Los Angeles Sentinel, an African American-owned newspaper, hosted fundraisers and talent search programs at the theater. , The Lincoln Repurposed , John Paxton Perrine, architect of the Lincoln, also designed other opulent theaters in the 1920s, including the California in San Bernardino (where humorist Will Rogers last performed before his untimely death), the Roosevelt in Hawthorne, and the Fox in Redondo Beach. In 1962, the First Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ bought the property. Bishop Samuel M. Crouch operated it as the Crouch Temple, a Pentecostal church that held many conventions in the 1970s. The Nation of Islam then used it as a mosque for a time at the end of the 1970s. The Lincoln is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.