The Tower Theatre is one theatre among many in the historic Broadway district in Downtown LA. It was designed by S. Charles Lee, who was one of the most prolific theatre architects on the West Coast.
The Tower Theatre opened its doors on October 12th of 1927, at the height of Broadway’s fame as the center of entertainment in Los Angeles (before the rise of Hollywood). However, over time, Downtown started to change and many theatres were unoccupied and unused above the second floors. Retail businesses moved into the ground floors, saving the buildings from demolition, a fate which some met.
Apple secured negotiations to lease the Tower Theatre and performed renovations from 2018-2021, before opening a new Apple store in the renovated space on June 24, 2021.
The clock tower, which is arguably the most striking feature of the tower’s exterior and the first clock tower on any theatre in the West, has seen changes through time as well. The clock tower was damaged during the Sylmar earthquake on February 9th of 1971, which precipitated the removal of the domed cap. It existed in that state for many years until the Apple renovation.
This sliding picture is originally from Steeber’s website about the Apple Tower; it is merely copied here. We did not come up with this experience; please check the bibliography for credits.
We decided to model the tower off the most recent plans we have access to from August 17, 1926. See the full plans below:
Enjoy this animation of what the clock tower 1926 plans edited to cover the 3D space:
Enjoy this animation of what the clock tower would look like if the 1926 plans had come to fruition:
Through our reconstruction of the clock tower using 3D modeling in Vectorworks, we realized that one advantage of reconstructing a section of the building so high up is that we can provide a perspective of the clock tower that the average-height human cannot normally experience. Explore the 1926 plan of the clock tower below, and if you have a VR device, feel free to explore the model in that format as well.
As can be seen by the comparison pictures from before, during, and after the Apple restoration of the Tower Theatre, Apple only made minor changes from the original to the exterior of the theatre. To the tower itself they essentially only fixed the damage caused by the Sylmar earthquake and the broken glass and rusted frames on the clock faces. In fact more changes were made from the 1926 plans for the tower to its construction in 1927. The fleur-de-lis and other decorative stucco work were replaced by a clock face on all four sides. This choice was most likely a publicity move to make the theatre stand out. The tower was built to just brush up against the building height limit of the time standing at a lofty 150 feet. So the tower was clearly meant to grab people’s attention, thus being the first theatre on the West Coast to have a clock tower only helped establish even more prestige for the Tower Theatre.
