Loew's 34th Street Showplace
234-238 E. 34th Street,
New York,
NY
10016
234-238 E. 34th Street,
New York,
NY
10016
9 people
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The original gold and brown color scheme was common for the more modern Loew’s theatres of the 80’s then as the new millenium came they changed their color scheme to red and grey featured in such theatres in the area as the Loew’s Kips Bay, 34th st (the new one on the west side, the Astor Plaza, E-walk 42nd, and the Tower East uptown).
What I always remember about the Showplace was that it’s colors of golds and browns were drab, but very common for theatres of that time peroid.
The theatre had a 600 seat auditorium downstairs, and a 450 and 350 seat upstairs. The seats from the theatre currently survive at Clearview’s Wayne Preakness Cinemas in Wayne, NJ.
This wasn’t a bad place to see a movie in the 80’s…saw Absence of Malice,The Verdict, Trading Places, Coming to America and Tucker here…It was I think one screen upstairs and two downstairs and presented a good alternative for the growing area population to going to the Upper East Side and Times Square
Clearview Cinemas ran the 34th Street Showplace in its final months of operation, from late 1998 through the theatre’s closing in August of the following year. Indeed, the theatre – which had been a strictly, first-run, major Hollywood product house – suffered (as much did the Murray Hill Cinemas, which stood one block west on 34th, near 3rd Avenue until its demolition in the early fall of 2002) in the wake of the opening of the Loews Kips Bay Theatre at 2nd and 32nd in the summer of ‘99, with its bookings suddenly concentrated on move-overs from the Kips Bay, independent, dependent, and art-house films, and the rare, first-run, major studio film – the last one being “Lake Placid”, a direct result of the boycott 20th Century Fox (and its dependent offshoot, Fox Searchlight) established against Loews Theatres when Loews refused to meet Fox’s terms for booking 'Star Wars, Episode One’ into Loews' Manhattan theatres, a stand-off which ultimately extended to all Fox releases through the summer of 2002.