Word came this week that one of the last two movie theaters in the Bronx, Concourse Village in Fordham, shuttered, leaving just one in the entire borough in far-flung Co-Op City. First-run features will go to streaming services soon; last summer, flicks such as Barbie and Oppenheimer, expected to do well, hit theaters first, but those days are numbered.
Growing up in Bay Ridge, where I lived from 1957-1993, we had our pick of several movie houses around the neighborhood. Above you see the Loew’s Alpine Theatre at 5th Ave. and Bay Ridge Ave. (69th St.) in 1941. The Alpine was opened in 1921 and was a movie theater from the start, though in the Silent Era it featured a full orchestra. A feature cost 15 cents, but you could book a whole day on Saturday or Sunday for a quarter. It was the first theater in Brooklyn without a balcony, but seated 2200 patrons regardless. It was never a vaudeville house, but a singer or instrumentalist would perform between screenings.
By 1976 the Alpine had two screens and, by 2015, eight. It lost its Loew’s sponsorship decades ago and is today run independently. The Alpine is the lone survivor of Bay Ridge’s once-many theaters. Among the features I saw here were Yellow Submarine (1968) and Return of the Jedi (1983—I waited on line in the rain an hour for that one).
In 1941 the day’s offerings were Cracked Nuts, about a lottery winner who gets mixed up with mobsters and a fake robot; Shemp Howard, without the other two Stooges, was in it. In The Parson of Panamint a preacher tries to tame a California mining town. Out of the photo on the right was Paul Nielsen Furniture, which survived into the 1980s.
The Fortway, at least, still looks like it was a theater. It opened on October 21, 1927 for movies and vaudeville acts and was a one-film theater for most of its existence, but as other theaters closed, the Fortway became a triplex in the 1970s and expanded to six screens in the 1980s. It succumbed in 2005 and became a supermarket in 2007.
One of the long-lost aspects of neighborhood theaters in the 1970s is that they often served as rock concert venues. The Grateful Dead played midweek matinee shows at the 46th Street Rock Palace, and Jethro Tull, the Kinks and other classic acts performed at the Ritz in Staten Island. The Fortway wasn’t outdone. Chuck Berry appeared here in 1972 touring behind his only #1 hit: “My Ding-A-Ling.”
The Dyker, 86th St. and Gelston Ave., opened in 1926 and closed in 1977. It was only a few blocks from our house and was the theater we visited most frequently. I also remember it—as well as several bars on 86th St.—for blasts of cold air as we walked past in the summer. Our building wasn’t wired to accept the juice that air conditioners required and so we put up with the heat.
Pay TV heralded the end of multiple neighborhood theaters and the Dyker prominently displayed this message on its marquee in the early 1970s: “Stop Pay TV!” Pay TV wasn’t stopped, and the Dyker gave up by the mid-1970s, with one of the last features being Willard. Though I saw a lot features here, I remember the double bill in late-1970: lone of the two Dracula movies that year with the inimitable Christopher Lee as the Count, and “Trog,” Joan Crawford’s final starring role, in which she plays against a heavily prostheticized Joe Cornelius as a prehistoric human rampaging through the British countryside. In recent years the theater was home to Lerner Shops and Modell’s Sporting Goods and is currently seeking a tenant.
The Harbor, on 4th Ave. and 93rd St., opened in 1935 and its Moderne façade is still in place, as well as its marquee, now laden with signage for the present tenant, Harbor Fitness. This was about 12 blocks away from our HQ, so we didn’t appear there often, but I remember a visit in 1970 to see Beneath the Planet of the Apes, set in the wreckage of New York City and in which Charlton Heston blows up the planet with a hydrogen bomb worshiped by subterranean mutants. The Harbor closed in 1979, wrapping up with the Oscar-winning Norma Rae.
I remember the RKO Shore Rd., 86th St. between 4th and 5th Aves., as the place I bought LPs in the 1970s and 1980s, as by then the building was home to “Nobody Beats the Wiz.” It was a theater between 1924 and 1951 and so I never experienced it as such. Currently, the building hosts a Victoria’s Secret franchise.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)