The Broadway movie palaces were built during Hollywood's golden age, when going to the movies was an event that demanded appropriate surroundings. The Million Dollar Theatre, opened in 1918 and designed by Albert C. Martin, was among the first of the great palaces on Broadway. The Orpheum, opened in 1926 as part of the vaudeville circuit's West Coast flagship, featured a French Renaissance interior with a 6,000-pipe organ. The Los Angeles Theatre, which opened in 1931 for the premiere of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, was perhaps the most extravagant of all — a six-story lobby with a cascade of crystal chandeliers. These were buildings designed to make everyday people feel, for two hours, like they were somewhere magnificent.

The district's oldest surviving theater dates to 1910, predating the movie palace era when the corridor was still establishing itself as a destination. The National Register of Historic Places designation — the first and largest theater district to receive this recognition — acknowledges eight blocks of concentrated architectural achievement. The buildings share a family resemblance in their scale and ambition even as their styles diverge wildly: Spanish Baroque, French Renaissance, Gothic Revival, Beaux-Arts, and variations on all of these appear within a few hundred feet of each other along a single street.

After World War II, white middle-class Angelenos moved to the suburbs, taking their consumer spending with them. The Broadway movie palaces found themselves in a neighborhood that was changing rapidly, one by one closing or converting to other uses. What saved the corridor — what allowed these buildings to survive into the era when their architectural significance could be recognized and celebrated — was the Latino commercial community that moved into Broadway's retail spaces from the 1950s onward. The theaters became swap meets, quinceañera dress shops, electronics stores. The Spanish-language signage replaced the original marquees. The buildings were used rather than left to deteriorate.

The district today operates in multiple registers simultaneously. Some theaters have been restored and host events, film screenings, and concerts. Others remain in commercial use for the Latino businesses that sustained them through the lean decades. The Broadway corridor draws both tourists seeking the historic architecture and shoppers from across the region using the street as a commercial hub. The friction between these uses — preservation versus active commercial life, restoration versus the organic adaptation of buildings to actual community needs — is ongoing. Some advocates argue that the best preservation is exactly what happened: buildings used, modified, and kept alive rather than frozen in amber.

A walk down South Broadway from 3rd Street to 11th covers a compressed century of Los Angeles architectural ambition. The facades are intact enough to convey their original scale; the interiors, where accessible, reveal either careful restoration or decades of improvised adaptation. Grand Central Market anchors the northern end of the corridor, having operated continuously since 1917. Angels Flight lifts passengers up the hill at the western edge. The district has been called, with some accuracy, the greatest surviving collection of movie palaces in the United States — all within walking distance of each other, in a city that is otherwise notoriously difficult to navigate on foot.