The 100-year-old movie theater was one of very few movie theaters in northeast L.A., where movie-goers could still see new movies for $10 or less. It was also a cultural hub for movie lovers and filmmakers, and for the last 10 years was the home of the Highland Park Film Independent Film Festival.
Why now: The theater closed late last month, but the current owner says his priority is to preserve the venue and there are hopes that the theater could reopen.
Dig deeper: Listen to the How To LA podcast episode on the Highland Theatre.
The historic 100-year-old Highland Theatre in Highland Park closed its doors late last month. Many Angelenos are mourning the loss, but still holding out hope for a reopening.
This three-screen theater was one of very few movie theaters in northeast L.A., on a street that’s been gentrifying for years. Tickets used to be $10 or less, and you could regularly catch a movie for only $6 on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
It was also a cultural hub for movie lovers and filmmakers, and for the last 10 years was the home of the Highland Park Independent Film Festival.
Why it closed
Talk about the theater closing goes all the way back to 2022 with a story in The Eastsider LA about a pending sale. The 99-year lease was about to be up last February, but it stayed open.
The theater was reportedly bought by Cyrus Etemad, who also owns Highland Park Bowl and other real estate along the Figueroa Corridor in Highland Park. Etemad let the theater’s operator, Dan Akarakian, stay rent free for another year, and that year is up.
But still the news of the closure caught employees and the neighborhood by surprise.
Denise Hernandez, who works at her father’s restaurant, Antigua Bread, remembers the many times she’d eat at the restaurant before catching a movie with her little brother. “It's a core memory for us ... And I didn't even know it was leaving,” she says.
The Highland Theatre’s history
The Highland Theatre is a proper movie palace with more than 1,400 seats (that’s bigger than the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood). It opened in 1925 and was designed by the same architect who did the Vista in Los Feliz and the Rialto in South Pasadena.
The area used to be a booming theater district, but as historian and film professor Ross Melnick explains, “Today the theater is all that's left of this once booming suburban theater district. By the 1950s, demographic shifts, the rise of television and other factors began impacting local theaters.”
Highland Park's Franklin Theatre closed in 1952, the Park Theatre closed in 1963, and the Highland itself struggled into the mid 1970s.
Like many theaters at the time, in the 70s, a new owner started screening adult films as a way to stay afloat and bring in more money, but that caused protests. According to Melnick, picketers, including local nuns, carried signs reading, "Decent movies for decent people. Shame, shame, what a disgrace. Get this filth out of our face." and the Highland Theatre did close for almost a year.
In 1975, the Akarakian family bought the theater, and a few years later they changed the space from a single screen movie palace to a triplex. To do that, they closed off a vintage balcony space and reduced the capacity to about 500 seats.
In 2022, Etemad bought the theater and according to the L.A. Times, he said his priority is to preserve the venue, and is currently looking at cinema and live music uses.
And the community is hoping that that’s the case.
Listen
Listen to the How to LA podcast: The Highland Theatre says Goodbye
#245: The Highland Theatre in Highland Park was one of the only movie theaters in Northeast LA. Now its closed. A designated historic cultural monument, the exterior will remain intact, but its future is uncertain. In this episode, How To LA producer Victoria Alejandro chats with host Brian De Los Santos about community memories, the history of the theater, and what might be next.
Local filmmaker and actress Marita De La Torre, featured in the 2024 Sundance film Ponyboi, is one of the founders of the Highland Park Independent Film Festival, which has been running for the last 10 years out of the Highland Theatre.
Highland Park Independent Film Festival 2023 poster.
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De La Torre was immediately drawn to the theater. “Give me a grand dame of a theater and I’m there,” she says. The Highland Theatre has been so beloved by the festival organizers that several team members are working on a documentary about its history.
HPIFF’s tagline is “Film For the People,” and their festival’s mission is to bring mentorship to local schools, give independent filmmakers a platform for their work, and facilitate community and networking between creatives in Northeast L.A.
De La Torre says that so many below the line and behind the scenes folks in the film industry live in Highland Park, and the community has rallied around them. Local bars like the Greyhound and the Offbeat have been major supporters. She says “we were able to survive because the community said ‘This is a good thing. This is something we want here.’”
While De La Torre isn’t sure where the fest’s home will be this fall, she’s certain they’ll find a space, and remains hopeful it might even be in the Highland Theatre again. In the meantime, they’ll be hosting free community film screenings in the nearby Tierra De La Culebra park.
Losing local movie houses
Without the Highland Theatre, Northeast L.A. is becoming more of a cinema desert. The closest first-run movie theaters are in Pasadena or Glendale, and while repertory screenings at Vidiots are just around the corner in Eagle Rock, there are no more neighborhood options.
The closure of Highland Theatre comes on the heels of other major movie theater news in the city. The Gardena Cinema’s pivot to a non-profit model and repertory screenings is what’s kept the theater running in the South Bay, and the Fox Village Theatre in Westwood survived due to major celebrity intervention.
Highland Theatre on March 7, 2024.
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Losing the theater creates a hole in the neighborhood — where once you could have gone to many of the restaurants and bars in the area before or after a movie, there’s one less light on Figueroa now.
A comeback?
In 1991, the theater was designated as a historic cultural monument by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commision — that protects its exterior from significant changes. And that vintage balcony, original ceiling, murals, and other elements hidden on the second floor during the triplex renovation are still there, and could be part of a future restoration.
Given what the new owner Etemad has said about utilizing the theater for cinema or live music, there’s a high chance that the Highland Theatre won’t go the way of the Tower in DTLA and end up an Apple Store.
A mural on the side of Triumph Optical in Highland Park features the Highland Theatre sign.
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And with gentrifying going on in the neighborhood for years, there’s still worry that the neighborhood will keep losing cultural hubs. As Marita De La Torre says, “we're hoping that it remains a theater and that, perhaps, it is brought back to its original form.”
The Highland Theatre occupies a central spot on a bustling walkable street, packed with restaurants, bars, and the bowling alley. A movie theater seems primed to do well, with the right programming and ticket price, and if it does reopen as a theater, it’d maintain the experience of a neighborhood night-out that so many indie theaters make possible.
And for now at least, it sounds like this might be more of an intermission than an end for the Highland.
Aaron Schrank
has been on the ground, reporting on homelessness and other issues in L.A. for more than a decade.
Published August 10, 2026 6:44 PM
L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman at a mayoral campaign event in May 2026.
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Topline:
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman will lose her spot as chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, she confirmed in a campaign video Monday. Raman, who is running for mayor, claims her removal is politically motivated.
Why it matters: Raman is running against incumbent L.A. Mayor Karen Bass in the November election. The councilmember has been chair of the Housing and Homeless Committee since 2023, where she’s had considerable power and responsibility.
Why now: The California Post reported that L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawsonis planning to announce this week that the city will split the committee into two parts — one on housing, the other on homelessness — neither of which will be led by Raman. Harris-Dawson, a longtime political ally of Bass, represents a large portion of South Los Angeles. He did not immediately respond to LAist’s inquiry late Monday.
Raman's reaction: Raman said in the campaign ad the move was a political attack. “I called for an audit of our homelessness programs in Los Angeles, and now I’ve been removed as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee,” Raman said. “I might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass, but Angelenos are the ones paying the price for these political games.”
Erin Stone
covers climate and environmental issues in Southern California.
Published August 10, 2026 4:41 PM
President Joe Biden will reportedly permanently ban future offshore oil and gas drilling in over 625 million acres of federal waters in an effort to cement his environmental legacy before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated January 20th. Platform Esther is located approximately 1.5 miles away from Seal Beach and operates within California state waters.
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Topline:
Hearings being held this week could decide whether California continues to have a say over what happens in federal waters off its coast. It’s part of the Trump administration’s efforts to supercharge industrial activities, including offshore drilling, rocket launches and desalination plants along California’s coast.
Why now: The hearings aim to gather public comments as part of a performance review of the state’s coastal management practices. Dozens of people turned out Monday to decry the administration's review.
Read on ... to learn how to give public comment.
Hearings being held this week could decide whether California continues to have a say over what happens in federal waters off the state’s coast.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s efforts to supercharge industrial activities, including offshore drilling, rocket launches and desalination plants along California’s coast. At a hearing Monday at a Santa Monica hotel and at a news conference beforehand, speaker after speaker decried any effort that would allow the federal government to revoke California's ability to manage its coast.
A federal law called the Coastal Zone Management Act gives states with coastlines the right to review and object to projects that may conflict with state policies and economies. The law was signed by President Richard Nixon after a devastating oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara and is credited with launching the modern environmental movement.
In a May social media post, the Trump administration said California is standing in the way of economic progress and called the state’s coastal management practices “obstructionist” and “environmental extremism.”
California officials, including state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, dispute that, saying the state approves federal initiatives 96% of the time.
“ Never before in the five-decade history of this federal act has this sudden baseless review taken place on any state's coastal management program, and never before in the history of this act has a coastal management program ever been revoked,” Crowfoot said at a news conference in Santa Monica on Monday. ”This federal administration is bent on industrializing our coast.”
The hearings, which are being administered by NOAA, could result in the federal government decertifying California’s rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act. A decision to do so would almost certainly be challenged in court, experts say.
That possibility has prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to call on Californians to submit public comments on the issue.
“Give the Trump administration an earful,” Newsom said in a statement.
How to get involved
NOAA will accept public comment until midnight Aug. 22. You can attend a virtual hearing or submit a comment via email.
Virtual hearings:
When: Aug. 11 and 12, 2 to 5 p.m.
Where: Virtual.
How: Each person who wants to attend either meeting must electronically register by 11:59 p.m. Aug. 10. Attendance will be limited to 1,000 people, and NOAA asks you only register for one meeting. After you register, you’ll receive a link to attend. To register for either meeting, use the following link: https://noaabroadcast.adobeconnect.com/e23ewcr5d65q/event/event_info.html.
Submit comment via email to czma.california-evaluation@noaa.gov. Include “Comments on Performance Evaluation of the California Coastal Management Program” in the subject line.
The hearings this week are solely for public comment. The review “seeks any new input from relevant stakeholders regarding spaceport infrastructure, offshore oil production, pipeline maintenance, desalination projects, and undersea cables,” according to a notice in the federal register.
Such reviews have happened before — in 2024 a draft review by NOAA found the state’s coastal agencies had properly carried out the CZMA. The review, however, was not finalized due to the change in administration.
“ L.A. County will soon achieve 100% renewable and reliable electricity. This is the change that we want to see,” she said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly starting foreign wars and skyrocketing the price at the pump.”
L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also spoke Monday at the news conference ahead of the NOAA hearing in Santa Monica.
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Tina Calderon, Gabrielino Tongva and Chumash culture bearer, speaks at Monday's news conference.
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Horvath is part of a coalition of local, state, tribal, environmental, legal and business leaders who are calling the review a “takeover” of state and local rights.
Orange County resident Grant Bixby, who founded the Business Alliance for Protecting the Pacific Coast, pointed out at the news conference that offshore drilling makes up a tiny fraction of the state’s coastal economy, which generates between $44 billion and $50 billion a year, according to NOAA.
"Should we put 99% of the other employment at risk for the benefit of one dirty industry?” Bixby said.
Bixby recalled how the 2021 Huntington Beach oil spill turned the beaches into a “ghost town.”
The NOAA hearing was held in a ballroom at the Santa Monica Hilton.
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Among the speakers at the news conference and hearing, a clear theme emerged: The coast is an integral part of being a Californian, whether you’re lucky enough to live beachside or you live inland and have a favorite spot to call your own on hot summer days.
“The point is that we all love our beautiful saltwaters,” said Tina Calderon, Gabrielino Tongva and Chumash culture bearer, at the news conference. “These are sacred waters, and it's up to us to be the voice. It's up to us to cause no more human harm. We've done enough.”
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Jackie, believed to be 14 years old, was receiving intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center for severe anemia.
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Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks & Recreation
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Topline:
Jackie, the bald eagle whose livestreamed life with her partner Shadow won the hearts of fans worldwide, has died, rescuersannounced Monday.
What we know: The famous eagle, believed to be 14 years old, was receiving intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center for severe anemia.
Read on … for more on Jackie’s life.
Jackie, the bald eagle whose livestreamed life with her partner Shadow won the hearts of fans worldwide, has died, rescuers announced Monday.
The famous raptor, believed to be 14 years old, was receiving intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center for severe anemia. She ultimately succumbed to her condition after a team of veterinarians struggled for weeks to figure out what was causing it.
Jackie remained critically ill despite receiving oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock monitoring.
"We know this news will be deeply felt by the many thousands of people around the world who have followed her journey, hoped alongside us, prayed for her, and supported the people caring for her,” the Ojai Raptor Center said in an Instagram post. “Our team is heartbroken. It has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her."
Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that launched the popular nest livestream in 2015, confirmed the news on social media.
“It is with great sadness and heavy hearts, to bring you the latest update from Ojai Raptor Center,” the nonprofit said to its roughly 1.3 million Facebook followers. “Please be kind to yourself, to others, to the FOBBV team and to those at the Ojai Raptor Center. Soar free Jackie…”
What happened to her?
The rescue center said on social media Sunday that she was “critically ill,” “unstable” and still in an "extremely serious” condition.
She was getting oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock care from vets and specialists across the country. But her red blood cell levels continued to drop well below normal after rebounding a bit when she was rescued.
Jackie was rescued in July by Big Bear’s Dana Point Park after a brief fight with two other eagles. Jackie was weak, vulnerable, underweight and unable to fly, according to the Ojai Raptor Center.
The center said the fight is likely what left her grounded, but her condition suggested she had been sick for some time.
How Jackie’s Big Bear saga started
Jackie was the matriarch of the famous Big Bear bald eagle nest since around 2017. She’s believed to be the first bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley in recent history, according to the nonprofit.
The pair believed to be her parents, Ricky and Lucy, left the area around 2016. The young Jackie then started hanging out in their old nest, where the livestream camera had been installed.
Jackie took on her first mate, a bald eagle known as Mr. B, and laid her first clutch of eggs in the nest the following season. Shadow came into the picture in the summer of 2018, refusing to leave until Mr. B eventually flew away from the area, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley.
Jackie and Shadow were mates ever since. They successfully raised six chicks together — Sandy and Luna this season, Sunny and Gizmo last year, Spirit in 2022 and Simba in 2019.
Heartbreak in the fan community
Jackie was a centerpiece of the worldwide community of fans around the famous eagles.
The L.A. County Department of Parks and Recreation said in a statement that Jackie taught the world so much about bald eagles and the importance of protecting wildlife.
“Her legacy will live on through the countless people who watched, learned, cared and were inspired to protect these magnificent birds,” the department said.
Marcy Billdt, a fourth-grade teacher from Bakersfield, said she was devastated to hear of Jackie’s passing.
“One of the greatest stories that I've learned from Jackie is her ability to be resilient,” Billdt said. “[My students] need to learn that although this life can really give you some tragic moments, it can also be the most beautiful of moments. And we've been able to experience a little bit of all of that with Jackie and through her life.”
Jackie helped Billdt’s students understand life's trials and tribulations, and for that, she’s thankful.
“We all go through loss. We all go through tragedy. We always go through joys of life,” Billdt told LAist. “This really did present itself as an opportunity for us to discuss some of those difficult, fragile types of things in our classroom.”
Jackie, Shadow and their family became part of her students’ day-to-day lives.
“We followed them. We wrote stories about them. We did art projects about them,” Billdt said. “As educators, we're always kind of expected to be able to pivot, have the correct answers, but I'm not sure that this is a case where I'm going to have all the answers, and that's going to be hard.”
Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.
More details: A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts and instead moving toward proportional representation, a system that elects multiple representatives in a single district in rough proportion to a party's vote share.
Why now: Earlier this summer, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging members to consider proportional representation as a solution to the redistricting brinksmanship set off by President Donald Trump last year.
Read on... for more on the poll.
Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.
A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts and instead moving toward proportional representation, a system that elects multiple representatives in a single district in rough proportion to a party's vote share.
Earlier this summer, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging members to consider proportional representation as a solution to the redistricting brinksmanship set off by President Donald Trump last year.
"There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes," they wrote. "We urge Congress to adopt a proportional system of representation, solving the gerrymandering problem at its source."
According to the poll conducted by the advocacy group Fix Our House and liberal think tank New America, half of 1,000 respondents said they support proportional representation, with nearly a quarter opposed. A third of those who participated said they were not sure whether they supported it or not.
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, said he was surprised to see how much backing there is for proportional representation, despite the idea being fairly obscure in the United States.
"It really did shock me how supportive people were of the various principles of proportional representation across the board," he told NPR.
While support was highest among younger, more educated, more left-leaning voters, Drutman found that 6 in 10 Trump voters who have an opinion on proportional representation said they back it, too.
American voters want more political parties
Pollsters also walked respondents through some of the tradeoffs of proportional representation — including that it can lead to multiple parties having to find a way to work together.
"For every one of those questions, people prefer the proportional system with multiple parties," Drutman said, "even if it leads to a coalition government that is maybe not quite as efficient."
He said voters also weren't very concerned when asked about the possibility of proportional representation leading to some more extreme political parties.
"One thing people said is they already think the parties are pretty extreme right now," Drutman explained. "So that's not quite the fear that some in the political class think it would be."
Jocelyn Kiley, director of political research at the Pew Research Center, said voters writ large have been in a "prolonged period of disaffection with politics and the political system."
She said Pew has found there is a lot of openness to reform, with nearly 70% of respondents to its polls saying they wish, at least somewhat, there were more political parties to choose from.
Kiley said detailed knowledge of what any election reform would look like is rare among voters. And she said that when many reforms "move from theory to practice," they often hit some resistance.
"People want to understand exactly how that reform will impact them," she said.
Room for a national conversation
Drutman told NPR the new poll numbers mark a starting point for what could be a national conversation about how to break out of the country's two-party system.
"People are dissatisfied," he said. "People are frustrated. People don't have a language for how to talk about alternatives because they haven't really heard all that much about the alternatives, because we haven't had a national conversation about the alternatives yet. So, there's a lot of room to have that conversation."
Drutman said only about a quarter of the respondents were aware that there are alternatives to a two-party system, and even fewer people could name an alternative when pressed.
In fact, only about 2% of the participants in the poll could name proportional representation off the top of their heads, said Dustin Wahl, executive director of Fix Our House,
"But when asked about the kind of underlying values beneath it and the component parts, there was widespread support from all across the political spectrum," Wahl said. "And that's not something we would have expected to see necessarily four years ago, for instance. But as the problems grow, the desire for solutions grows, as well."
Proportional representation is currently the most widely used electoral system among the world's democracies. Wahl points out that the U.S., along with the likes of Canada and Australia, has a system that was abandoned long ago by other countries.
"Arguably the only reason we don't use proportional representation is because it wasn't used anywhere in the world at the time of [America's] founding," he said. "And we just kept doing elections the same way."
The poll also found a majority support (54%) for expanding the House, with 150 new members.
There are bills in Congress, with all Democratic co-sponsors, that would study or move the U.S. to a system of proportional representation, but Wahl said any bill that doesn't include expanding the House is "politically dead in the water" because without expansion, lawmakers have to choose to potentially vote themselves out of office.
"That [150-seat expansion] gives you enough of a cushion so that members, incumbents know that they're very likely to hold on to their seats," he said. "It wouldn't run into the problem, at all, of candidates or of sitting members of Congress thinking that they're going to lose their seats because their elections would be totally untouched."
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