The Abandoned Loews Canal St Theatre

A while back, I was walking down the street on the Eastern-most stretch of Canal Street when this defunct television store caught my eye. Then I looked up at the rest of the building and said, "Whoa, what the heck is this place?"

This was originally the Loew's Canal Theater. Built in 1927, it was designed by Thomas W. Lamb, one of the country's most prominent theater architects, and, with 2,314 seats, was the second-largest movie theater in the city at the time. It was part of the empire of Marcus Loew, who made his fortune with a series of penny arcades and vaudeville houses and then movie theaters, and was a co-founder of MGM Studios. Loew died the year this theater opened. Despite its size and elegance, it primarily showed B movies and serials. In 1932, an explosion damaged the box office, while a simultaneous blast occurred at another Loew's theater. It was suspected to be the work of the striking Motion Picture Operators' Union Local 306, but nothing was proven.

It closed in the 1950s, and in the early 60s, the lobby was converted into a retail space and the theater used as a warehouse. The interior of the theater still remains, dilapidated and decaying. Incredible ruin porn photos can be seen here, here, here and here.

The appliance and repair shop was the last retail store, closing several years ago. There have been various plans to convert it into an arts center or residences, but nothing has come of those plans. You can sometimes see someone going into the building; maybe it's still being used for storage? The façade was designated a New York City Landmark in 2010. At the Landmarks Commission hearing, Thomas Sung, the current owner, said, "At some point in life we all must recognize, I guess, the value beyond a commercial purpose." If only more real estate developers would have this epiphany!


History and Photos of the Theater

After The Final Curtain - Loews Canal Theatre

Untapped Cities - Inside The Abdandoned Loews Canal Theater

Animal New York - Closer Look at Decaying Loews Canal Theatre

Curbed - Decaying Loews Canal Theater Makes For Incredible Ruin Porn

Gothamist - Inside the Abandoned Old Loews Theatre on Canal Street

Mapping Yiddish New York - Yiddish Empires - Marcus Loew and Loews Canal Street Theatre

Before It's Gone: Lee Brothers' Auto

Every once in awhile, I get off at the Carroll Gardens stop at Smith and 3rd St. and this building catches my eye, especially when the afternoon sun is cutting across it, casting these dramatic shadows. Every time I made a mental note to draw it someday. A few weeks ago, I happened across this post saying that the property would be demolished and replaced with a residential development, so it instantly became one of my "Before It's Gone" projects.

The building is kind of an eyesore, but sometimes eyesores are more interesting to me, visually. In addition to the shadows created by the auto shop's deep overhang, I'm also intrigued by the decaying Mediterranean-style roof and façade on the left. I love these bits of leftover archictecture. I think of it as a type of architectural palimpsest, "something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form," a phrase derived from old manusctipts in "which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain."

In this case, that part of the building is the century-old remnants of the Court Theatre, a movie house which operated from 1922 to 1941. I think that Spanish-esque tiled roof is part of the Hispanophile trend in architecture of the late 1920s, where buildings were given faux-European characteristics to lend them a sense of elegance and sophistication. I wrote about this before in my post on the Seville Studios.

As the photo below shows, the original theater, which had 560 seats, was more than double the current length. At some point, it was cut in half, perhaps for the construction of 3rd Street, which now runs where that billboard was. Why the whole building wasn't demolished, I have no idea. Surely it would have been easier than demolishing half of it, and gutting the other half to turn a theater into a garage? And yet no one bothered to removed that little piece of decorative roof. Here's another old photo of the theater.

1932 photo by Percy Loomis Sperr. NY Public Library

In 1942, it was turned into a gas station called Pep Service Station, and in 1992 it was purchased by the Lee Brothers, who operated it until recently. Apparently, there has been talk of the brothers closing their shop for years, but now it's definitely happening. It will be replaced by a four story residential building.


Sources:
https://pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com/2018/01/after-years-of-planning-its-official.html

https://pardonmeforasking.blogspot.com/2014/11/it-was-bound-to-happen-lee-brothers.html

https://www.brownstoner.com/architecture/brooklyn-architecture-375-smith-street-court-theater-carroll-gardens/

http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/22021

Smith Union Market

This little corner store in Carroll Gardens caught my eye last week. It was shuttered in the middle of the day, so I was unsure if it was still open for business. I looked it up later, expecting to find the same old story about a small business being priced out by skyrocketing rent, or a business owner who'd reached retirement age without a successor. What I found out was quite different and unexpected!

The store is owned by Vinny Taliercio. It opened in 1945, one of three meat markets owned by his grandfather, Placido Scopelliti. His daughter, Marie, married Vincent Taliercio, who took over the meat market and diversified it into a general store. After Vincent's death in 1986, son Vinny joined his mother and two brothers in running the store. Vinny, now 65, is the only surviving sibling, and their children did not join the business.

I didn't get to see the inside, but a New York Times article describes it like this: "Take all the random stuff out of that dresser drawer where it tends to land, and all that stuff's distant cousins in the kitchen drawer, and the exotic little screws and bolts from the untouched corners of the toolbox. Put them all on shelves in a dark little room, add coolers stocked with beer, and declare everything for sale. That's pretty much the business model at the Smith Union Market in Brooklyn." It's a local landmark, an institution in the neighborhood, and a meeting place for local elders.

So why the shuttered doors? Well, in February, Mr. Taliercio was arrested in a sweep of Genovese Organized Crime Family. He's alleged to have acted as a middleman for a mafia gambling network. Reportedly, he was caught on police wiretaps arranging bets between the mafia and bettors, including celebrities including Charlie Sheen, Tony Danza, Paul Sorvino, James Caan, Larry David, and James L Brooks.

Mr. Taliercio made bail and has been back at the store, but I guess he has some matters to take care of. He, of course, denies the allegations. "I work 98 hours a week, seven days a week," he says. "No mobster works those hours."


Sources:

Behind Old Doors: Smith Union Market

NY Times: Corner Store Owner Denies Family Ties: All Five Families

https://www.casino.org/news/charlie-sheen-james-caan-hollywood-celebs-caught-up-in-mafia-gambling-sting

Before It's Gone: Sunshine Cinema

This one is already kind of gone. The Sunshine Cinema had its last screening on January 21. The building is still standing, for now. It will be demolished in a few weeks, to be replaced by, you guessed it, a glass high-rise tower.

The building, at East Houston and Forsyth Street, was built in 1898. It was originally a Dutch Reformed Church. It later became a prize fight club called the Houston Athletic Club, and in 1909, it was purchased by Charles Steiner and Abraham Minsky for $96,000 (approximately $2 million in today's money). They turned it into the Houston Hippodrome, offering movies and Yiddish vaudeville, catering to the Lower East Side's large Jewish immigrant population. It was renovated and renamed Sunshine Theater in 1917. Eventually the theater went out of business, and the building was used as a warehouse for a family hardware store for decades. In the late 1990s, Tim Nye secured the lease and partnered with the Los Angeles-based movie chain Landmark Theaters to renovate the building. It opened with its old name, Sunshine Cinemas, in 2001.

The Sunshine became a fixture in NYC's cultural landscape, and was successful. But its rent was well below current market rate, and its lease was about to end, and so . . . The building was sold to East End Capital and K Property Group last year for $31.5 million. Despite its long history, it was turned down for landmark status because it had had too many alterations over the decades. And so, that was that for the Sunshine Cinema. It's a familiar story by now.

I don't wring my hands every single time an old building is torn down or a long-lived business goes out of business. To be honest,  I hadn't been to the Sunshine in many years. I think a lot of people fetishize old New York buildings and businesses without question. My friend Noah Diamond wrote a piece called 400 Years In Manhattan, and one passage has always stuck in my mind:

We're on our fourth Madison Square Garden, and there are plans for a fifth. We're on our second Yankee Stadium, and there are plans for a third. Of course, many are heartbroken at the thought that Yankee Stadium will be demolished, and it's easy to sympathize with them. But it's also easy to sympathize with those who were heartbroken in 1923, when the current stadium replaced the original one; to them, the Yankee Stadium we know and love is a soulless imposter. People were heartbroken in 1930 when the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Thirty-Fourth and Fifth was demolished; they said that without that building, this just wouldn't be New York City anymore. But in its place, we built the Empire State Building. Did that make it more or less like New York City?

Noah makes a good point here. But. One thing that strikes me about much of the current development of the city is how plain and dull and uninspiring it really is. This is the building that will be constructed on the site of the Sunshine.

I can't imagine that if this torn down in 100 years, that people will mourn it. Will anyone have nostalgic sentiments for all these glass boxes? Will anyone argue for landmark status to preserve these things? Will a sense of history ever attach to these ubiquitous generic glass towers? Maybe they will. Maybe everyone will be like, "We're losing all our classic early-21st century minimlaist glass architecture!" But here's another thing: With the exception of its stint as a warehouse, this building had always been a place of communal activity; first as a church, then as a sporting club, then as an entertainment venue. Its replacement is just boring offices. Hard to imagine that an office building will find a place in people's hearts. But then again, the Empire State Building is just a very tall office building, so who can say?


Sources:
http://tenement-museum.blogspot.com/2011/06/meet-neighbors-landmarks-sunshine.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/nyregion/sunshine-movie-theater-closing.html

http://www.boweryboogie.com/2018/01/sunshine-cinema-will-close-good-january-21/

http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2018/01/heres-the-glassy-tower-set-to-replace-the-historic-sunshine-cinema.html