The Vanishing Cinemas Of New York City

News came this week that the last single-screen cinema in New York City, the Paris, was closing. This set up a lot of nostalgic weeping among certain folks, and indeed, there is something lost when a theater like this, that does not have a candy counter, has a velvet curtain, and plays classical music before the show starts, goes the way of the dinosaur.

When I was going to movies in New York in the '80s and '90s there were dozens of single-screen theaters. I missed out on the days of the movie palaces that were prevalent in the '20s and '30s and then crumbled into dust or were chopped up into smaller multiplexes (I attended some films in screening rooms that resembled closets), but there were plenty of theaters that had just one film at a time. Just some of them that I can remember: the Biograph, the Regency, the Festival, the 57th Street Playhouse, the Beekman. On one street across from Bloomingdale's there was Cinema 1, Cinema II, the Baronet, and the Coronet. In Greenwich Village was the 8th Street Playhouse, known for their midnight shows of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Ziegfeld was the largest theater, if you didn't count when Radio City Music Hall played a movie, and as the name suggests, it was once the home of the Ziegfeld Follies. The first movie I ever saw in New York City was there, and it was a doozy: Apocalypse Now.

Slowly some of these theaters were turned into "multiplexes," such as the Waverly, which wasn't a big theater to begin with but somehow was turned into three screens. Then multiplexes were built from scratch, and I must admit they are impressive. There's the Lincoln Square, with each screen named for a famous movie palace, and the AMC Empire near the Port Authority, which have big screens and all the amenities, although you may have to take escalator rides that make you think you're going to the top of the world.

One multiplex that has closed is the Lincoln Plaza, which was a strange place--it was entirely underground--that showed art films. I must have seen fifty movies there, everything from Woody Allen to Ingmar Bergman, and the idea that there is now no place on the Upper West Side for art movies is chilling. The Paris, which is on 58th Street, just around the corner from the Plaza Hotel, began by showing French films, but branched out to show art films from around the world. I distinctly remember seeing Kenneth Branagh's Henry V there, as well as Allen's Alice on a snowy December night.

New York City is constantly changing, and there's no way that everything can remain exactly the same. It is said that the business model for theaters that only show one film is not sustainable anymore. So be it. The way we see movies is changed for good. We should probably be thankful there are still any cinemas at all, for surely one day all films will be watched on our computers.

In Las Vegas, where I live, there are no single-screen theaters. Instead there are numerous multiplexes, each a few miles away from each other, all showing pretty much the same films. You don't have to go very far to see whatever it is you want to see. If you want to see a foreign film or an art film, you might get to see it at a few multiplexes that cater to that crowd, otherwise you have to wait for home video. I think this is how most cities are or will become.