New York has had some pretty grand movie theaters over the years, something that can be easy to forget in the age of bland stadium seating and cheap 3-D glasses we live in. Luckily, the old theaters aren't really all gone—they're just resting. The late Loew's Kings Wonder Theater is in the process of being brought back to its glory, but others, like the one above a bodega in the East Village, are set to be demolished. And some are simply in purgatory, like the Loew's 46th Street Theater in Brooklyn. This space is currently being used for furniture storage (sigh), but has miraculously retained some of its original details—according to Cinema Treasures, "Everything between the wall and the original entrance became a retail space. Everything beyond the wall, towards the original screen, has remained relatively intact."
The theater originally opened on October 9th, 1927 as the Universal Theatre, later becoming the Loew's 46th Street. It was the first "atmospheric theater" in the city (they used to project clouds on the ceiling!) but it is possibly most famous for its brief stint in the early 1970s as the Bananafish Garden—sometimes known as the 46th Street Rock Palace—that featured performances by everyone from the Grateful Dead (listen to their 2:30 p.m. set here!) to Steely Dan to the Bee Gees... and yes, the venue was named after the J.D. Salinger short story. There is plenty of video online of the Mahavishnu Orchestra's show at the venue, which closed under community pressure in 1973.
Since then the soaring space has been used for furniture storage, with its lobby now acting as a show room for Regal Furniture. Luckily for the rest of us, photographer Matt Lambros got into the theater itself earlier this year and has posted some gorgeous photographs on his site After The Final Curtain. The detail work they used to put into those theaters is seriously incredible—can you imagine something like this at the Kips Bay theater?
