The First Permanent Movie Theater in the US Opened in Los Angeles

Before purpose-built cinemas, moving pictures were a sideshow. Audiences caught them in vaudeville houses, traveling tent shows, and storefront “nickelodeons” tucked between other businesses. There was no place built solely to watch a film.

That changed in 1902, when showman Thomas Lincoln Tally opened Tally’s Electric Theatre at 262 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. It is widely cited as the first permanent theatre in the United States designed specifically for the exhibition of films, rather than a shop converted for the night.

Admission was a single dime for about an hour of moving pictures.

Early programs mixed actualities and short dramas such as The Capture of the Biddle Brothers and New York City in a Blizzard. The novelty drew crowds, and by 1903 the venue was renamed the Lyric Theatre and folding vaudeville into its bills. Tally’s experiment pointed toward the nickelodeon boom and, eventually, the movie palaces and multiplexes that followed.