In 1924, The Valley Grand Building was completed on the north east corner of Valley and Garfield. It was the first building on the site of what was a wheat field the year before. Like many new buildings today, it featured businesses downstairs with apartments and office spaces on the second floor.
The main feature of the Valley Grand was a play house theater. It was operated by Lou Bard and called the Garfield Egyptian Theater, which fashioned itself after the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The new venue, hosted plays, vaudeville style acts, and moving pictures of the silent era. By 1928, ‘talkies’ began to be shown at the Garfield Theater while plays and vaudeville were forgotten.
At the time, there was a growing theater chain owned by the local entrepreneur James Edwards, who bought all the theaters in Alhambra and became the biggest theater owner in the San Gabriel Valley. In the 60s, the Edwards group bought the Garfield Theater.
My first visit to the Garfield was a matinee in 1954. The feature was Disney’s 1942 film, Bambi. My brother and I with a neighbor kid were dropped off in front of the theater. Before we went in, we crossed the street and had a hamburger at The Hat, as the pleasures of pastrami were not yet known to me.
It cost a quarter to get in to see Bambi and if memory serves, there were cartoons on before that. There was a multitude of movie choices at the Garfield and Alhambra’s other theaters, the El Rey and the Alhambra. But by May of 1980, the Garfield closed briefly only to be resurrected by a Chinese group who began screening films from Hong Kong in November of that year. The Garfield continued serving the growing Asian population in Alhambra until 1999, when it closed for good.
