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
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