One of MacArthur Park's grand old theaters may get a second act, LAist reports, if a nonprofit can raise the money to buy and fix it.
The building
The Westlake Theatre opened in 1926 as a 1,949-seat vaudeville and movie palace, one of the ornate picture houses that once lined the boulevards of a growing Los Angeles. It ran as a movie theater until 1991, and it has been closed ever since, roughly 35 years dark.
It has not been empty, exactly. The ground floor now houses a swap meet full of small businesses, a genuinely useful commercial use, while the historic auditorium above sits unused, its faded Anthony Heinsbergen mural, the work of the muralist who decorated many of the city's landmark interiors, still overhead. That split, a working marketplace below and a frozen movie palace above, is the current state of the place.
The plan
The revival effort is led by the Strindberg Laboratory, a nonprofit theater company that wants to turn the auditorium into a community arts and nonprofit hub: live performances, film screenings, neighborhood council meetings, lectures, arts workshops, and office space for community groups. "We welcome everybody and anybody," said Michael Bierman, the group's founder. "Everybody has something to input in their community."
The near-term steps are concrete. A steering committee is to form in the coming weeks, with a target of purchasing the building in winter 2026, followed by a restoration expected to take several years.
The very large caveat
Here the enthusiasm meets arithmetic, and the honest framing matters. The group estimates $6 to $8 million to acquire and restore the theater, and it has not yet secured major funding. It is looking to philanthropic, local, state and federal sources. In other words, this is at present a plan and an aspiration, not a done deal, and the building's history is a warning: the Community Redevelopment Agency bought it in 2008 with restoration plans that stalled when the agency was dissolved in 2012, and it was sold in 2018 to an entity controlled by Jamison Properties. Grand plans for the Westlake Theatre are not new; funded ones are.
Why it matters for the neighborhood
MacArthur Park is a dense, working-class, heavily immigrant neighborhood, and a restored theater there would be a community asset of a specific kind, not a luxury venue but a place for local performance, meetings and gathering, run by a nonprofit rather than a developer. That is a meaningfully different proposition from the market-rate reuse that historic theaters usually get, and it is why the effort is worth watching even at the aspirational stage.
Whether it happens turns entirely on the money. The Herald will report if the Strindberg Laboratory closes the purchase this winter, and whether the millions needed to restore a 100-year-old movie palace actually materialize.
