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The Palace Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles is 101 years old, but is trying to make the most of a one-year-old restoration that has brought its glamorous interior--including some hidden-gems--back to life.
Last weekend, the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation led a tour of the historic venue that once regularly featured vaudeville acts, silent movies, and famous entertainers. Re-opened and celebrated in the summer of 2011 for its 100th birthday, the Palace had been undergoing a decade-long restoration that the L.A. Times likened to "detective work" thanks to the theater's "dismal state" of disrepair and piled-on paint and fixtures that obscured the original majesty of the venue.
A bit more about the tour from the Times:
On the tour, the guides showed how the building had evolved in its various iterations: It originally had box seats, but those disappeared with the introduction of talking movies. It had an organ, and then it didn't. There had once been an orchestra chamber, but now it was gone. And the instrument room didn't originally have a functioning toilet right by the door. Other stops included a ladies' lounge with a window overlooking the entrance so that women could spot their dates, outdoor stairs to the upper-level galleries used at a time when the theater was segregated.