Before the Los Angeles Music Center, the...

Before the Los Angeles Music Center, the city’s cultural heart flourished for 77 years at the northeast corner of 5th and Olive streets.

George Gershwin played his last concert there. Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington lectured there. John Philip Sousa and Igor Stravinsky conducted there. Buck and Bubbles, not to mention Pavlova and Nijinsky, danced there. Jack Benny and Fatty Arbuckle told jokes there.

Bob Fitzsimmons even boxed there in the brief time that fisticuffs were on the program. And the golden voice of flamboyant Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson could be heard there.

Almost everybody who was anybody in the performing arts entertained at Hazard’s Pavilion. For years it was the premier home of the lively arts in the City of Angels. In its last years, it was the first home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In the 1880s, when Los Angeles was a town of 11,000 on the eve of spectacular growth, showman George (Roundhouse) Lehman envisioned the largest theatrical center of this city-to-be and bought the land on which to build it.

But before his dream could take form, Lehman went broke and the property was sold to City Atty. Henry T. Hazard and pioneer George H. Pike. Hazard soon became mayor of Los Angeles.

Construction began in 1887 on the Pavilion, a three-story clapboard building 120 by 166 feet, with a 50-foot-high ceiling, ornate double doors and 4,000 seats. Its cost: the imposing sum of $25,000.

The velvet curtains of the city’s largest theater first rose in April, 1887, on the National Opera Company, which arrived with 300 singers, ballet dancers and musicians, and “100 tons of baggage.”

The following year, Hazard put the theater to a very different use, championing the notion of dividing California in two. Delegates from the 6th Congressional District met in the Pavilion to discuss the possibility of forming a “state of Southern California,” with its northern boundary at the Tehachapi Mountains. But the movement came to nothing.

The Pavilion was a focal point for sports and religion as well.

In 1892, America was going crazy over its first big-time sports event--a boxing match between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in New Orleans.

In an early version of pay-per-view, more than 1,500 people gathered at Hazard’s to watch a telegraph operator sitting onstage, jotting down blow-by-blow descriptions of the fight and handing the information to another operator who made announcements through a megaphone. Corbett won.

By the turn of the century, top boxers such as Jim Jeffries, Bob Fitzsimmons and Denver Ed Martin had fought at the Pavilion.

Meanwhile, on Sundays the building took on a quite different personality. It was leased to the Temple Baptist Church. Then the church and local business raised enough money to take over ownership and rebuild the Pavilion into an even bigger auditorium.

The group hired architect Charles F. Whittlesley, who caught plenty of scolding from his contemporaries for his “wild” schemes: cantilevered balconies that eliminated bothersome pillars, and a great domed ceiling.

In 1906, the old Pavilion was razed and the new “Theater Beautiful,” as it was immodestly named, rose on the site, becoming the city’s third reinforced concrete building and the largest and most elegant auditorium west of Chicago. It served double duty as the home of Temple Baptist Church.

One of the few great entertainers of the time who failed to perform here, according to city lore, was the magnificent but not overly brave tenor Enrico Caruso. Caruso, who fled in a panic (and in his nightshirt) from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck, had been negotiating to appear here later to celebrate the auditorium’s first season.

But after the quake, Caruso vowed never to return to a part of the world so close to shaky San Francisco--and he apparently did not.

The auditorium, still part-owned by the church, was re-christened as Clune Auditorium in 1915, when Billy Clune, a pioneer film exhibitor, leased it as a motion picture house, premiering D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” which ran for two years.

Other pictures followed for shorter runs until 1920, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic took it over as its home, and the building adopted its final name, the Philharmonic Auditorium.

The Philharmonic, founded a year earlier, performed at the showplace for 44 years, and the Los Angeles Opera Company performed at the site for 27 years. The faded curtains fell for the last time in the auditorium in 1964, two weeks before the Music Center opened. The church continued using it as a house of worship until 1984.

In 1985, the once-grand auditorium finally crumbled into rubble, giving way to a parking lot.

The closest thing to classical music on the corner now is the statue of Ludwig van Beethoven in Pershing Square. It stands facing the parking lot where Gershwin played and Stravinsky conducted.