The Lincoln Theatre opened on South Central Avenue at 23rd Street in 1927, built in Moorish Revival style at a cost of $500,000 with a 25-foot-wide marque, a large stage, an orchestra pit, and seating for 2,100, and quickly became known as the “West Coast Apollo” because it presented many of the same stellar acts as Harlem's Apollo Theater. Its opening night featured Curtis Mosby's Dixieland Blue Blowers orchestra and the silent film Rose of the Golden West starring Mary Astor and Gilbert Roland. During its 35-year run, it offered motion pictures, stage shows, talent shows, and vaudeville, and it was among the West Coast's first theaters for African Americans at a time when they were barred from movie palaces or restricted to “colored only” seating in downtown Los Angeles. Bardu Ali, a New Orleans jazz and R&B singer, served as its nightly master of ceremonies and performed with his band from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Its stage hosted Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Fats Domino, Sammy Davis Jr., and B.B. King. The theater drew both black and white patrons, and its resident company, the Lafayette Players, presented dramatic and comedic productions, including the 1928 staging of Rain starring Evelyn Preer, which attracted Charlie Chaplin, Irving Thalberg, Janet Gaynot, and Fanny Brice. In 1935, Jack Benny emceed a fundraiser there for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's campaign for a federal anti-lynching bill, with participants including Jimmy Cagney, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Capra, and Lionel Hampton's Orchestra, though the bill later died without a vote despite Eleanor Roosevelt's support. In the 1940s, the Los Angeles Sentinel hosted fundraisers and talent search programs there. John Paxton Perrine, the theater's architect, also designed several other opulent 1920s theaters. In 1962, the First Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ bought the property, and Bishop Samuel M. Crouch operated it as the Crouch Temple, a Pentecostal church that held many conventions in the 1970s. At the end of the 1970s, the Nation of Islam used it for a time as a mosque. The building is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
