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The Last Picture Shows: The Nation's Magnificent Movie Palaces Are Fading Away |
| Section: THE ARTS / FILM |
| Author: Elliott Stein |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1987 |
| Size: 2,566 Words, 15,403 Characters |
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The movie palace was one of America's great inventions. Yet few members of today's "youth audience," habituated to attending movies in shoe-box multiplexes with Band-Aid size screens, can understand the dictum of Marcus Loew, the founder of MGM: "We sell tickets to theaters, not movies. The show begins on the street." The last quarter century has seen the decimation of the palaces, those luxurious conglomerations of world architecture, the first total environments of our century. Most of them have been twinned, triplexed, piggybacked, or gutted, knocked to the ground and turned into parking lots or supermarkets that feature Turkey Loaf Specials in lieu of the glamour that was Clara Bow, Valentino, and Joan Crawford.
Most Glorious of All
A recent feature story in the New York Times (July 26,1987), entitled "Broadway's Grand Cinemas Are Fading Away," noted that with the demolition this year of three historic theaters--the Strand/RKO Warner Twin, the Rivoli /RA Twin (it was Broadway's Parthenon, with Doric columns and a pediment filled with a beautiful frieze) and Loew's State--Times Square "is losing almost every vestige of its moviegoing past." That is the understatement of the year. New York was home to the first movie palaces, built in the teens; in the twenties came the Roxy, the most glorious of them all. Now, not one New York movie palace survives from those decades intact and functioning as originally intended, whereas downtown Los Angeles can boast of a historic theater district where for bl...
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...ttle, and in St. Louis, Rapp and Rapp's superb Ambassador, in the French style, to be gutted by a developer to make way for retail stores. Earlier this year, the Keith's in Flushing, Queens, one of the rare surviving atmospheric theaters designed by Thomas Lamb, was demolished and will be replaced by a shopping mall. These losses are irreplaceable; such buildings will never be built again.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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