Apple Tower Theatre is a new Apple Store designed by UK studio Foster + Partners inside an abandoned 1920s movie theatre in Downtown Los Angeles. Foster + Partners worked with the technology company to renovate the historic building, which was originally designed by American architect S Charles Lee in 1927 in the baroque revival style. Originally home to the first theater in Los Angeles wired for film with sound, the historic Tower Theatre has lain empty and unused after it closed its doors in 1988. It’s also been a frequent filming location and has been featured, among others, in The Last Action Hero, Transformers, and is a favorite shooting spot for David Lynch.
After Betty and Rita are seen entering the neon-lit doorway for Club Sliencio in Mulholland Drive, the following scene shows them watching a dreamlike show inside that mysterious club. Lynch filmed that interior scene in The Tower Theatre, which is also where Lynch filmed the Mulholland Drive scenes where Theroux’s character is seen staying inside a run-down place called the Park Hotel. Years later, Lynch returned to the Tower Theatre, using its interior as a location in the third season of Twin Peaks (or, as many people call it, Twin Peaks: The Return). This was the otherworldly space occupied by a character known as the Fireman (a.k.a. the Giant) and Señorita Dido. On his Twin Peaks Blog, Steven Miller analyzes where Lynch filmed these scenes within the building.
After walking through the Broadway doors, visitors enter the monumental lobby inspired by Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera house, featuring a grand arched stairway with bronze handrails flanked by marble Corinthian columns. The movie theatre's original balconies remain in situ, and Apple plans to use the space as an auditorium for daily skills workshops and presentations from local filmmakers and musicians. An original stained glass window with a pattern that includes coiled strips of film has also been painstakingly restored, along with a fresco of a blue and cloudy sky that arches over the double-height space.
Apple Tower Theatre anchors the corner of Eighth Street and Broadway. While the Broadway Theater District, home to a network of Latino-owned small businesses, has remained largely devoid of big global chains in its recent history, Downtown L.A.’s historic core is now undergoing a fast-moving transformation as big-box retailers and hospitality brands, including Urban Outfitters (the Rialto Theater) and Ace Hotel (the United Artists Theater), revive and reactivate Broadway’s concentrated wealth of historic theaters, many of which had gone to seed over the decades. Just north of the Apple Tower Theatre on Broadway and West Fourth, near Grand Central Market and the famed Bradbury Building, the neighborhood’s first high-rise constructed in over a century, a 35-story luxury residential tower, opened to residents this spring.
For businesses owned by people of color, large companies like Apple moving in will be a mixed blessing. It will bring foot traffic, which is good, but will those customers stop and purchase at a mom-and-pop store, and will those Latino-owned businesses eventually get displaced? Deep-seated racial disparities often mean they cannot rely on money from family and friends to start new enterprises, while also struggling to secure credit from banks. A gleaming Apple store is a wonderful thing, but a new reality is emerging from the rubble of the pandemic’s economic devastation: COVID-19 was a toxin for underdogs and a steroid for many giants. As we enter a new evolutionary stage of retail, one glaring trend is the mass commodification of the streetscape. Everything that we typically decried about chains—their cold efficiency, sterility and predictably, may come to feel like a blessing following a period when people felt stalked by murderous pathogens.