Neighborhood Movie Theaters

When I was an unadventurous Flatbush "yoot" back there in the 1950s, there were only two movie theaters that mattered: the Leader and the Kent, both on Coney Island Avenue, and both within an easy walk. The Leader was closer to my East 9 Street home and it was there that I spent many a rainy weekend afternoon ostensibly watching a double feature while sprinting in the aisles, hurling popcorn at the kids who were down in front, and dodging the "matron." The Kent was more of an expedition but still less than a quarter of a mile away. I once saw a show there with my father (Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)], memorable because it was the only time I ever went to the movies with him -- he was no frivolous moviegoer. In my childish innocence, I assumed that both the Leader and the Kent had been in place since time immemorial and that moviegoing began and ended with these two theaters. They were like mountains and rivers, permanent features of the landscape (or, rather, cityscape). I was very wrong. All is flux and movie theaters come and go. According to that most valuable resource, Cinema Treasures, over 27,000 cinemas in the United States have been closed or demolished, with many more endangered -- killed in the 1930s by the Depression and then in my time by the TV and DVDs and discs and streaming and covid. And also by self-inflicted wounds -- the studios and independents have failed to produce a regular supply of films for grownups and instead fill the shopping mall screens with CGI effects and infantile fantasies and "franchises." Nevertheless, the Kent is still in business, as a small-screen "art" theater, but the Leader long ago devolved into a bowling alley -- the Leader Lanes. Later it became a pharmacy. I don't know what has become of it lately; probably something dreadful.

There's much more to the story than the Leader and the Kent. In my youth, there was also the Culver Theater, the outside appearance of which I knew very well but never the interior. The Culver was located at the corner of 18th Avenue and McDonald, just a block away from the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I shelved books for 75 cents an hour all through my Erasmus Hall years.  

The Culver was adjacent to and almost under the Culver Local, the "El" or elevated subway, that ran along McDonald (formerly Gravesend) Avenue. ("Elevated subway", by the way, is one of the most fabulous unappreciated oxymora of our time). The Culver was a big spacious theatre that sat 1445 people. I imagine that most of the paying customers had a tough time catching the dialog when a train rumbled by. I wish I could identify what film was playing when this picture was snapped, but alas the image is blurred. The styles of the automobiles suggest a date in the late 1930s. The Culver has long disappeared and nowadays the most prosperous commercial venture on its former block is the Tashkent Supermarket. 

Then there was the Beverly, located at the intersection of Church Avenue and East 2 Street, just a few blocks from Erasmus Hall High School at Church and Flatbush.

On the day of this photo, the Beverly was showing Away All Boats, a 1956 war drama featuring Jeff Chandler, but as we all know, Jeff was in fact Erasmus alumnus Ira Grossel. The movie in which he starred was playing just down the way from his old high school -- a marvelous serendipitous coincidence. The Beverly's second feature, Raw Edge, was a western with Rory Calhoun and Yvonne DeCarlo. Did I plunk down my quarter to watch a war movie and a western? It was certainly the kind of programming that would have attracted my seventeen-year-old self. I have no recollection of either feature but I am able to bring to mind an image of young lovely Yvonne DeCarlo. The Beverly operated from 1920 to 1981 and has since, sadly, been transformed into a T-Mobile showroom. 

There was also the Rialto

at the corner of Cortelyou Road and Flatbush Avenue. It was directly on my route as I walked to Erasmus Hall High School with Steve Lewin five times a week between 1952 to 1956. It was also a block or two from the Sears, Roebuck store, where in the summer of 1956, I handed out parking tickets to drivers entering the Sears lot. Their cars looked a lot like the ones in this picture. Last I heard, the Rialto had transmogrified into the Cortelyou Road Church of God -- a sorry fate. 

In addition to the theaters that I attended or might have attended in the days of my youth, there were another bunch that had already shut up shop. The most prominent was the Newkirk Theater on East 16th Street -- and therefore only five or six blocks from P S 217. It stood just across from Newkirk Plaza, the shopping center that also housed an express stop on the BMT line. The Newkirk started life as the TNF, named after the initials of its trio of builders. It might have been, originally, a legitimate theater.

In 1928 it reopened as a cinema with a performance My Best Girl with Mary Pickford (who lived for a while with Doug F. at 1320 Ditmas). It closed in 1940 and has since been demolished. It must have been quite an ornament to the neighborhood, but I rode my bicycle on that street many times and never detected the least sign that there had once been a handsome theater there. I wonder also what became of the grand Robert Morton organ that accompanied the silent films. Later the Newkirk acquired a proper movie marquee as can be seen in this fragment of an image.

 The Newkirk was gone for good in 1940.

Then there was the Dorchester, a the corner of Dorchester and Coney Island Avenue. Here's how its building appeared a few years ago:

 

I must admit that this slice of the old neighborhood has resisted gentrification.

 

I can't find an image of the Cortelyou Photoplay Theater at the intersection of Cortelyou and Marlborough, which seated 400 and closed in 1928, but here's how the Ditmas Theater at 115 Ditmas (near East 2 Street) looked in 2013. Apparently the building was derelict or near-derelict for a long while. Now, I'm told, it's been transformed into "luxury apartments."

 

I predict that in a couple of generations, the movie theater will be totally extinct although a few will survive as museums. Future ages, if there are future ages, will gasp at the way we entertained ourselves in the thrilling days of yesteryear. 

 

But I gotta tell you, it was hell of a ride while it lasted.

Comments

[Carol Saturansky]

I'm so glad I discovered your webpage/blague today, Vivian. Can't stop reading bits. Now this one: I religiously attended the Beverly Theater every Saturday afternoon for much of my early childhood. Or so it seems. Double features, watched some shows more than once; I just sat there for hours. I would go with a friend, she'd come over for lunch beforehand, and we'd walk/skip to the Beverly together - just one block from my house near McDonald Ave. I remember perfectly the snow-white-haired matron with her weaponized flashlight, deputized drill sergeant that she was. Who were these matrons and where did they come from, anyway?

I, too, was an Eurasian, -- I wrote ERASMIAN and was thus transformed by autocorrect --and discovered, one weekend evening, that the ART theater right near Erasmus on Flatbush Ave exhibited a completely different and unknown form of movie, a movie made on a planet in a different solar system: I'M ALL RIGHT JACK. starring Peter Sellers, and the entire audience roared uncontrollably, thundering laughter in my ears.This was humor that was beyond anything I'd heard/seen before. This movie changed my life! I won't go into that. EHHS Yay Team!

[robert Forst (nee Cohen)]

Brought back many childhood memories. Thank you

[Don Z. Block]

The Leader was great for Abbott and Costello flicks and excellent horror movies like "Isle of the Dead" with Boris Karloff, a genuinely creepy film, one of his best. The Kent featured mostly arty foreign films. It was featured in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo." The Kent competed successfully with The Vogue on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue L (I believe).I do recall that in both the Leader and the Kent, no matter what film we were watching, the villain was really the matron.

Other theaters: the Midwood, the Elm, the Kingsway, and one in Brighton Beach, the Oceania, where I saw "Some Like it Hot." I think there was also one on Avenue U, probably called the Avenue U.

Good times.