Theaters are a Reminder of Cinema’s Wonder Years

“Going to the movies just isn’t the same,” my mother always says as we climb the escalator to the top floor of the multiplex, stale popcorn in hand, to shiver through a 90-minute flick.

My mother, who grew up in the Bronx, was a bit spoiled by the movies she saw as a child. The closest cinema to her home was the Loews Paradise Theatre, located on the Grand Concourse. Opened in September 1929, only a month before Black Friday, the opulent theater contained 1500 seats and was designed to resemble a 16th century baroque garden.

The fixtures were plaster and painted to resemble gold and marble. There were reproductions of paintings of Marie Antoinette, a painted curtain of a Venetian garden scene, and busts lined the walls of the “atmospheric” theater, one of the last of its kind. The pièce de résistance, though, was the twinkling representation of the New York City skyline, which glittered above moviegoers inset in the colossal, midnight blue, domed ceiling. “When the movie would get boring,” my mother said, “we would stare at the ceiling.”

This theater was actually one of five flagship theaters, called the “Wonder Theaters” after the Robert Morton “wonder organ” contained within. The other theaters, in Jersey City, N.J. and every borough except Staten Island, have become a topic of relatively recent interest among historians and urbanists. Each one had a theme—Queens housed a theater in a Spanish colonial style, and Jersey City’s was built in the rococo style.

All built in 1929 and 1930, shortly before the stock market crash, they were vaudeville and film houses that catered to all-day entertainment. For a small price, audience members could sit in the huge space all day for dancing, vaudeville, and a film. This kind of entertainment died with the Depression, but many of the spaces converted to film houses or theaters­—for example, the Paradise added seats over the orchestra pit.

Almost all of the theaters have been at least partially restored to their former glory, and I had the opportunity to tour the Loews Paradise Theatre a few years ago. Due to the changing neighborhood, a series of fires, and the unfortunate mistake of turning the space into a multiplex in the 1990s, the space lost much of its former glory. Walking up the gilded staircases and into the cavernous theater, though, I grew nostalgic for a time I never knew.
While many of the fixtures and the original curtain are missing, the narrow seats, the long, deep stage, the turrets of molded plaster, and the balcony remain. Inside, the lights are no longer twinkling, due to electrical problems with the old circuits.

When I visited, they were turning the space into a community performance center, and the once charred curtains had been replaced with new, red curtains, much like my mother remembered. The organ was moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. and played again in November 2007. The other theaters are churches and entertainment venues, including the fully restored 175th Street Theater, where Björk played two years ago.

This month, Film Forum hosted a month of depression-era films called Breadlines and Champagne, where they screened the films that made the last Great Depression unique. On a story about the event on CBS Sunday Morning, they quoted New York Times columnist David Carr. He said, “I think certain things happen when we are in manifestly dark times. And I think when darkness is intruding from every direction, people like to go in a room and hold hands and stare at a little campfire in common. It’s a way, number one, to forget about what’s out there, and it’s also a way to experience community.”

By remembering the lessons of America’s most famous depression during which community entertainment was a fixture, maybe the Wonder Theaters won’t seem so antiquated after all. At the very least, they could bring back the double feature.

Jennie Rose Halperin is a Barnard College junior majoring in American Studies. Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt runs alternate Wednesdays.