“But even losing that area, we had a tremendous amount of original material to work with. “Almost the entire house-right side was lost to damage - we had to rebuild all that plaster,” says Martinez.Since the Kings was built primarily for movies, “we repoured three-quarters of the floor,” says Martinez, “and the entire center portion of the balcony.”
#Neerja movie in brooklyn theatre movie#
Movie theaters can have a shallowly sloped floor, since everyone’s looking up at the screen live-performance halls need a steeper rake, lowering the sight lines toward the stage.When we put up the scaffolding floor, and got up to those things for the first time - those figures are 11 feet from top to bottom. “You’ll see pairs of figures on either side, and they look proportionally correct, normal. “When you go in, look up at the top at the spiral columns on either side of the stage,” says restoration architect Gary Martinez.The space was reused for dressing rooms - and additional bathrooms, because “I think there were four toilets for 3,600 seats before.” There was a basketball court, of all things, in the basement - “a primitive one, but it was there,” Martinez says. *This article appears in the Januissue of New York Magazine. Enter, and you can convince yourself that you are both at the center of the world and transcending it, in the presence of either God or Miss Ross. In fact, the other three - in Washington Heights, on the Grand Concourse, and in Jamaica, Queens - are now churches. The economics of film still cut against enormous rooms like these. Diana Ross will reopen the hall on February 3.Īll five Wonder Theaters made it out of limbo, although only the Loews Jersey, in Jersey City, regularly shows movies. It cost $94 million to dry it out and get it fixed, and just about every over-the-top detail has been meticulously put right. The Kings was down, but not out.Īfter decades of what-do-we-do-with-this-thing inertia, the Kings has been overhauled by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, to be run under contract by the Ace Theatrical Group. Scavengers stole the copper pipes and the fixtures. The building was abandoned, the roof buckled, and the interior got wet. The Kings had opened with Dolores Del Rio in Evangeline, a silent film played in sync with shellac records it closed in 1977 with a cheap Bruce Lee biopic. The neighborhood grew seedier just as the movie-exhibition business started to favor multiplexes over giant single screens. Chuck Schumer crossed its stage in cap and gown. Being one of the only really big auditoriums in Brooklyn, it also hosted dozens of high-school graduations. Spending a day at “the Lowies,” as it was curiously pronounced, was a pretty far cry from sitting around your parents’ apartment on Avenue P. But that was the point: The Kings was built for architectural escapism along with cinematic escapism. “Huge! Even for those of us who have seen hundreds of theaters, the first time you walk down onto the orchestra level, it’s just a massive room.” In 1929, a building like this was already retrograde, gaudy, overwrought. “It’s huge,” says the architect Gary Martinez, whose firm, Martinez + Johnson Architecture, has been restoring it. With candy, 30 cents.īrooklyn’s Wonder Theater was even called the Kings - the Loew’s Kings. The new exhibition palaces had pipe organs, like cathedrals, and some of the pictures even talked, all by themselves! And when you set foot in a golden auditorium that seated 3,600, you too could feel imperial, at a cost of 25 cents. There were five of them, called the Wonder Theaters.
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