The Avalon Casino: Why Catalina Island's Most Iconic Building Still Works

There is a moment, arriving by boat into Avalon Bay, when the Casino reveals itself. It sits at the northern tip of the harbor — a great cylindrical drum of white concrete, twelve stories of Spanish Colonial Revival rising from the water's edge with the kind of quiet confidence that only the best buildings possess. Before you've set foot on the island, it has already told you everything you need to know about the place.

A Name Worth Explaining

Let's start with the obvious question: why is it called a casino if there's no gambling?

The word comes from the Italian casa — "house" — and its diminutive casino simply meant a small gathering place or social club. The name predates its American association with gaming entirely. When William Wrigley Jr. named his new entertainment hall "The Casino," he was reaching back to that older, more civilized meaning: a place for the community to come together.

And that is precisely what it was built to be. The lower level houses a grand movie theater — one of the first purpose-built cinemas in California equipped for sound. The upper level is a ballroom with a 10,000 square foot sprung dance floor, designed to hold 3,000 dancers at a time. Two entirely different programs, stacked, sharing a single iconic form.

Wrigley's Vision: Building at the Edge of the Depression

Catalina Island History

The Casino was completed in 1929 — the same year the stock market crashed — which makes it either an act of extraordinary optimism or extraordinary stubbornness. Probably both.

William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate, had purchased controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company in 1919 and immediately set about transforming Avalon into a world-class resort destination. The steamship crossing from Los Angeles took just a few hours, and in the 1920s that journey carried a genuine sense of occasion. You dressed for it. You arrived somewhere.

Wrigley understood that a destination needs an anchor — a building so distinctive it becomes the reason to come. The Casino was that building. Its construction represented an enormous investment of resources and vision at a moment when most of the country was pulling back. For the island's year-round community, it was also an act of civic faith.

Architecture: Spanish Colonial Revival Meets Art Deco

Catalina Island Casino

Casino Custom Lighting

Casino Architectural Drawings

The Casino was designed by architects Sumner Spaulding and Walter Weber — a firm well-versed in the Spanish Colonial Revival vocabulary that dominated Southern California civic architecture in the late 1920s. But the building is not a pure stylistic exercise. Look more carefully and you'll find Art Deco details woven throughout: the geometric ornament on the exterior walls, the stylized marine motifs referencing the sea just feet away, the custom lighting fixtures that blend Moorish and Moderne sensibilities into something entirely their own.

The plan is a simple cylinder — a rotunda — which is both a practical and a poetic choice. Practically, it allows the ballroom above to have an unobstructed floor plate with no interior columns interrupting the dance. Poetically, the circular form reads equally well from every angle as you move around the bay. There is no front or back, no hierarchy of façades. The building belongs to the water and the hill simultaneously.

At 12 stories, it was the tallest structure on the island, and the relationship between its scale and the low-rise fabric of Avalon below was deliberate. It needed to be a landmark visible from the sea. It succeeds completely.

The Interior: Two Worlds Stacked

Casino Ballroom

Casino Seating

Casino Ballroom Disco Ball

Casino Structural Diagram and Description

Step inside and the building reveals its double life.

The theater on the lower level seats nearly 1,200 people in a space lined with hand-painted murals by artist John Gabriel Beckman — scenes of undersea life rendered in rich Art Deco color. The seats, the lighting sconces, the ceiling treatment: all of it designed as an integrated whole. This was not an afterthought. In an era before television, the movie palace was the most democratic of cultural institutions, and Beckman's murals gave Avalon's theater a quality that rivaled anything on the mainland.

Ascend to the upper level and the ballroom opens up beneath a domed ceiling. The sprung dance floor — engineered to have just enough give to make dancing effortless — is still in use today. The structural diagram tells the story of how this was achieved: the ballroom effectively floats above the theater below, with the cylindrical wall doing the heavy lifting and the floor spanning freely within it. It is an elegant structural solution that has lasted nearly a century without apology.

Building on an Island: A 1929 Engineering Achievement

Casino Under Construction

It's easy to take the Casino for granted now that it has been standing for nearly 100 years. But consider what it meant to build it in 1929.

Every cubic yard of concrete, every steel member, every custom tile and chandelier had to be barged across 22 miles of open water from the mainland. There was no large construction workforce permanently on the island — crews had to be transported, housed, and fed. The site itself sits at the water's edge, requiring careful attention to foundation conditions and the long-term effects of the marine environment.

That the building has endured as well as it has — structurally sound, architecturally vital — is a testament to the quality of its original construction. Good buildings are built to outlast their builders.

What Makes a Building Iconic

I've thought about this a lot over the years, and I keep coming back to the same idea: a truly successful building eventually stops being a building. It becomes part of the identity of a place — something so embedded in how people picture that place that removing it would feel like an act of violence against the landscape itself.

The Avalon Casino has achieved that. You cannot imagine Catalina Island without it. It organizes the bay. It gives arriving visitors their first impression and their lasting memory. It is the image that appears on every postcard, every photograph, every mental picture anyone holds of the island. That kind of inseparability between a building and its place is not automatic, and it is not accidental. It is the result of scale, material, siting, and form all working together at the highest level.

By that measure, the Casino is not just a successful building. It is a great one.

Catalina's Preservation Philosophy

Avalon Bay

Part of what makes the Casino so dominant — and so legible as a landmark — is what surrounds it, or more precisely, what doesn't. Approximately 88% of Catalina Island has been preserved as natural open space under the stewardship of the Catalina Island Conservancy. Only the remaining area, concentrated primarily around Avalon, is developed for human habitation and use.

This is a remarkable planning decision, and its architectural consequence is profound: the Casino has no visual competition. The hills behind it are green and undeveloped. The bay in front of it is open water. The low roofline of Avalon frames it without obscuring it. The building reads exactly as its designers intended — as a singular civic monument at the edge of the sea.

In a different context, surrounded by the sprawl of a typical coastal town, it might be just another large building. Here, it is unmistakably itself.

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