Skip to main content

American Movies Theater: Yiddish Nickelodeon, Underground Rock Venue, and Blue Man Group studio, to be Demolished


      Situated directly to the left of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is an unassuming two-story brick building spanning 238-240 East 3rd Street. In the Fall of 2017 this building, owned and operated by the Blue Man Group as a rehearsal and production studio for almost twenty years, hit the market for a tidy $12 million, and by April 2018, EV Grieve reported that permits had been filed for a new 7-story residential development at the site. While these initial permits were rejected, and new ones have since been filed and remain pending, the demolition permits were approved this past July and a plywood barrier was erected around its ground floor in December.
      Constructed in 1913 as the American Movies Theater, it was part of a new wave of inexpensive theaters (known as nickelodeons for their 5-cent price) which swept the Lower East Side, an alternative to the vaudeville houses which dominated much of the Jewish theater culture. Hailed by its owner and founder, Charles Steiner, as the "best, richest theater on the East Side", the American Movies Theater boasted six-hundred seats, a roof which could open up in the summer, and all the silent Yiddish-language films you could want.

(circa. 1940)

       Unlike many of the Yiddish Vaudeville houses, the American Movies Theater managed to adapt to the cultural shifts in the neighborhood, showing an increasingly more "popular" array of films, sustaining itself as a movie theater well into the 60's. At some point in the 70's (this is an estimate based on what little information I could find) it became the "New Pilgrim Theater", but it is not clear if the ownership changed hands even though the American Movies Theater itself ceased to operate.
      Among the few fragments I can find on the New Pilgrim Theater is a single show flyer for a small music festival on September 18, 1981, called "Music for Millions", featuring fledgling band Sonic Youth, Y Pants, Rat at Rat R, and the Nihilistics. Three months before Sonic Youth recorded their debut EP, and only a couple after their formation, this show would have been an interesting convergence of the nascent hardcore and no wave scenes, and a very particular moment in the shifting terrain of New York City's punk movement.





Labels:

Comments

  1. Joe McGintyMarch 4, 2021 at 6:47 PM

    Was just doing some research. New Pilgrim is now Rossy's Bakery next door. Before that, it was Slug's, a jazz club that ran from 1960 to 1972. Still, it's incredibly sad that they tore down that building.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NYCHA's "NextGen Neighborhood" Towers & the Fate of the "White House"

      In a previous post  I discussed the city's plan to demolish the LaGuardia Bathhouse building, one of the oldest public baths in NYC, an attempt in-part to save face in the wake of the recently unveiled plans to raise the East River Park. I anticipate similar news for the "White House", the former Rivington Street Public Baths, which sits squatly in the middle of the Baruch Houses, maybe a 15 minute walk from the LaGuardia Bathhouse building.        A short history: At 118 years old, the Baruch Bathhouse building is not only the oldest public bathhouse in the city, but also the first of its kind to be opened in New York. It's namesake, Dr. Simon Baruch, was an Eastern European Jew who moved to South Carolina in 1855 (at 15 years old) to live with, and work for, a wealthy German-Jewish family. After receiving his medical degree in 1862, Baruch served as a surgeon in the f*cking Confederate army (even treating soldiers for weeks after the defeat at Gettys
3 comments
Read more

Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

      Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they were inevitab
2 comments
Read more

Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

            After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold.       I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the right and left
2 comments
Read more