This was once an incredible movie theater, with a cool exterior building and a covered courtyard entrance leading to the main building, which is now the only thing remaining. It stands at the corner of Atlantic and Whittier in East L.A. There is a great website devoted to old theaters, called Cinema Treasures, and there's a photograph of what the Golden Gate Theatre looked like in 1965. My older brother and sister would bring me here when I was just a little boy, and my grandparents lived a few blocks away.
On a side note, while I was snapping a few images here, a man approached me and asked if the rest of the theater was going to be torn down. I don't know. But we got into a discussion about this theater and the area. He told me his dad used to bring him to the movies here and he had vivid memories of that era. When he mentioned where he went to high school, I was surprised that it was also my alma mater. Then he said that he graduated in 1978 and I was blown away! We graduated from the same school in the same year, but didn't know each other. And here we are, nearly 30 years later, talking about people we knew in high school while standing in front of a shut down theater in East L.A.
