Embassy 1,2,3 Theatre
707 7th Avenue,
New York,
NY
10036
707 7th Avenue,
New York,
NY
10036
38 people
favorited this theater
Showing 951 - 975 of 1,093 comments
Thanks, Chris for the pic and info. So the Palace is actually south of the DeMille? I thought it was north (my knowledge of Times Square geography is a little fuzzy). Is it really true that it had no stage facilities? I seem to remember it had some concerts there in the early 70’s.
Here’s an ad from the New York Times, 4/28/68. The DeMille was about to show the Russian version of “War and Peace”, in 70mm. Those prices were awfully steep for 1968, but it WAS a 6 ½ hour movie:
View link
Yeah, the razing of 1600 Broadway, while sad (it was a pretty historic building considering the businesses that once occupied it…) was awesome to behold. They did a pretty neat job of getting it down. I’m no engineer but 701 7th looks kind of complicated. It goes midblock and it’s like a maze of buildings in there. Wish you could see it. 1600 was completely a stand alone structure like The Rivoli was.
CConnolly: So glad you got the picture. I was beginning to have my doubts at 1am this morning when I decided to send it when I went on line to check for any email messages. As I mentioned, I have some other pictures which I would be more than happy to email you. P.S. I was the one to take all the pictures. Way back in 1968 with my little instamatic camera! Everytime I went to New York City I would photo the theatres. Little did I know then that years later they would no longer exist. I am especially pleased with my picture of the Rivoli during the engagement of the 70mm version of “GWTW.” And the Criterion during the “Funny Girl” engagement. My picture of Loew’s Capitol would almost duplicate the one shown on this websites listing for the theatre. I have other snapshots of the DeMille during the Reade engagement of the Russian two part “War and Peace.” That picture shows the entire billboard and just the marquee in the corner of the snaphot. However, I am still searching the house for the other pictures I know I have somewhere. I have only managed to find pictures of 7 Time Square Theatres and 7 Philadelphia center city theatres. We can only hope that the Mayfair/DeMille can be spared and come back to life again!
Well look at the recent razing of 1600 Broadway for condos. It came down without any real problems. Look at the soon tobe razed Howard Johnson in Times Square. It might not be a large parcel of land, but it can be built up. So with the way the building the Mayfair is located in and the auditorium and the amount of tenants in the building. The owner is holding out for something large, like another tall building in Times Square. Buying a tenants lease option is not a real problem for a property like that. The owner would stand to make a few million on the sale or in razing the building.
I’m just saying this because nothing is that safe in the Times Square area that has not been in full use recently.
Ok…I’m getting a tad obsessive about this now but if you want to see what this building looks like today (actually, about two years ago…) go to this website: http://www.walter-samuels.com/commer_set.shtml
Scroll down about ¾ and look for the entry for 701 7th Ave. I wrote the address wrong above. The building is managed by a company called Walter & Samuels. It says the square footage for the theater is 50,000 and there are 1,140 seats. Interesting…
If only Donald Trump were a big fan of classic widescreen movies. He could buy the building, renovate it to what it was in its glory days and call it the Trump Theater. Sort of like what Paul Allen did in Seattle when he saved their old Cinerama Theater.
TJ: hard to describe…the building into which the Mayfair sits kind of wraps around the auditorium (L shaped) so the southside of the auditorium isn’t exposed at all to 47th. The theater looks actually nestled into the structure. Very unusual, at least in my very limited architectural experience.
Warren: I went by the Mayfair today (always wonder if I see someone gazing at it also is it someone from this site!) and I found (I think) that the Mayfair is part of the building known as 701 West 47th Street. The entrance is on 47th across from the exits for the Palace. There are about six tenants in the building..one is a record company. I could not get into the very small lobby but it looks decently maintained. Any buyer of the building wishing to demolish it would have to deal with each tenant and their various lease options. Also, just buying this building would not (IMO) give a builder enough of a footprint upon which to build anything prominent like what was built on the site of the State. I’m sure there are builders who could but space in Times Square is not exactly tight right now.
Again, this could keep the old Mayfair up for who knows how long?
A lot of the windows on the 7th Avenue side have been bricked over, because of the large billboards.
Is the side of the auditorium on 47th or is that part of the building above it? Let me know what you find out!
The office building is the original building that was built along with the Mayfair. It’s actually an astonishingly thin building. From what I can see, the part of the building that faces 7th Avenue is really, really, thin. I have no idea how many feet across but trust me, it’s small. The building does not cover the Mayfair/DeMille auditorium at all. You can clearly see the roof and such. From here, there does not appear to be any damage to the roof and the a/c units are still intact but look battered. I believe the office building is occupied but I cannot imagine who the tenants are. Perhaps I’ll take a walk today and find out. I’ve been curious myself…
DennisZ: thanks for the shot of the DeMille. Very interesting. The theater looks very, very low key then. Who ever took the photo obviously was taking a picture specifically of the DeMille because it’s so clearly centered in the photo.
I’ve always been curious about the DeMille. I remembered seeing ads for it in the late 60’s early 70’s in the NY Times and wondered what happened to it. (didnt find out until I discovered this site). Is the office building occupied? How high is it? How much of the theater is covered by the office building?
Benjamin: you make points that I agree with and have stated previously. The only reason why I even became aware of this theater is because my office building looks directly down onto it. I remember being in someone’s office and I realized that the structure I was staring at was a theater. Being interested in that stuff, I checked out the front and saw the marquee. This site helped me to find out all about it. The marquee that now stands for the theater hardly makes anyone take notice of it at all.
Yeah, I agree that it’s kind of fallen through the cracks. It will be interesting to see what might happen to it. Would preservationists go for it? Maybe. Wouldn’t it be so ironic that a theater that was forgotten gets resurrected simply because it’s the last movie theater from a bygone age that’s still standing? I think we’d all agree that if we could’ve save one Times Square theater, we would probably pick one of the “others” (Capitol, Rivoli, Strand, Criterion, etc.) and NOT The Mayfair. But it’s still standing so that means something. That is what I said in my E-Mail to Christopher Gray of the NY Times.
What I find interesting about the Columbia / Mayfair / DeMille is how low-profile this theater seems to have been. I wonder why this is the case?. (If this is, in fact, the case.) Here are some guesses:
Partly I think it is because of the peculiarities of the theater’s history. Books on the theaters of Broadway, like Henderson’s, Van Hoostraten’s and Morrison’s, don’t seem to have any info on it because it was never, apparently, a “legitimate” theater — but a burlesque / movie house instead. A book like “The Best Remaining Seats” doesn’t seem to include the Mayfair because it was a “Johnny-come-lately” retro-fit movie theater and neither an historic pioneer (like the Regent or Rialto) nor a “true” movie palace. Books that are primarily architecturally oriented, like the AIA Guide, Stern’s “1960” (I haven’t looked it up in his earlier books, though), etc. don’t seem to mention it because, despite the apparent attractiveness of its interior, it was not particularly special or unique when it was reconstructed as the Mayfair. And popular guidebooks, like the WPA Guide to NYC, don’t seem to mention much about it either, because, again it was “just another” big movie theater, among many, when it was constructed.
So, in a way, this theater (along with those two old vaudeville [?] theaters on Eighth Ave.) seems to have “fallen between the cracks.”
Speaking personally, I don’t ever recall having been interested in visiting this theater in any way — although in the 1960s and late 1950s I was interested in seeing movies in many of the other theaters in this area. And again I wonder why?
I wonder if it is because of the kind of movies that the theater showed. I was too young to see, “Psycho.” And it seems to me that all the other “big” movies that I was interested in seeing in the 1960s all seemed to play other theaters in the Times Sq. area instead.
And although the DeMille was hidden by an office building (which was, in turn, covered by a billboard), I don’t think this was the reason — because I was always intrested in seeing what the interiors of the Astor and Victoria were like, and they too were behind office buildings that were covered by a gigantic billboard.
So, I’m wondering if the design of the lobby and marquee may have had something to do with it? One reason I always wanted to go into the Astor (and, perhaps, to a lesser extent the Victoria), for instance, was because their designs “drew you in.” The Astor in particular was redesigned in such a way (hard to describe) that the inside of the theater seemed to extend out to the sidewalk. The same was true, I believe, to some extent with the Strand (Warner?). And, if I remember correctly, you could actually see the grand stairway (by that time a grand escalator) of the Capitol from the street.
The marquees and street entrances of the Rivoli and Loew’s State both seemed to me to be very glamorous in a modern sort of way. (And while not a movie theater at the time, in the 1960s the underside of the Winter Garden theater was a spectacular profusion of light bulbs, although I don’t think it was in good repair and still in use by that time. But it still seemed very impressive.)
So, in a way, my personal experience would seem to bear out the belief of movie theater builders and operators that spectacular “packaging” will help make people interested in your product. Along these lines, one of the websites mentioned in the Roxy theater thread mentions, I believe, that early theater owners often built very wide, arcade-like entrances for just this very reason — to catch the eye and draw people in. (I believe the link was quoting one of the classic movie palace books — but not the Ben Hall one.)
CConnolly: I have a picture of the Demille Marquee from 1968-1969(?) when “Shoes of the Fisherman” was showing on a roadshow engagement. You can see the entire marquee and just a corner of the big billboard on the corner advertising the movie. My email address is Send me your email address and I will email you the picture.
I’ve seen a lot of pictures now of this theater when it was the Mayfair and can see a lot of it in it’s present condition but I’ve never seen a picture of it when it was the DeMille. Does anyone have any recollection of what the marquee looked like then?
Im curious why you think this should be the Mayfair? Believe me I don’t like the name Embassy but thats what it’s last name was and as most people know it.
I agree 100% with Warren that this theater should be listed on this site as the Loews Mayfair. Not sure how to go about requesting a change.
And Yes…Benjamin, thanks for pointing out the method to search for some other great photos! That one of The Roxy under construction is worth the patience searching through it. Awesome photo!
P.S. — I get the feeling that the database for each of the various photo archives on the NYPL site is separate from all the others. So if, for example, you are seaching for the the “XYZ Building” in the Milstein collection, you will not be searching for the “XYZ Building” in all the other collections. (This is just a guess on my part.)
Plus it seems to me that the collections are not organized the way one may think they “should.” For instance, I think I saw that one photo of a theater I was interested in was labeled “drugstore” because to the archivist the drugstore in the photo was more noteworthy than the theater.
I say this because I suspect that there may be a number of interesting theater photos scattered throughout the various collections, but that it will probably involve lots of scrolling through the various collections to actually find them — that the search feature is of limited value.
I went back to NYPL Milstein Collection (officially listed as, “Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s -1970s”) and found a 1917 photo of the Columbia Theater. The entrance to the Columbia Theater was indeed further to the south — symetrically (sp?) in the center of the facade.
The windows above the Columbia’s tunnel lobby entrance seem to be basically the same as those for the Mayfair. What was changed in the remodeling were the windows above the new entrance. So maybe the “Paramount” style of entrance was the new thing, and they did it with the Mayfair too?
I was unsure how to properly post a link, but here’s how you can find the photo:
1) You go to the main NYPL Digital Archive page;
2) then to “Cities and Buildings”;
3) then to “Phtographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1900s” (Milstein);
4) then search for (Photo ID) 709811F. It’s on page 191 of the thumbnails.)
It’s interesting to read that the opening movie at the Mayfair was an Amos ‘n Andy film called “Check and Double Check.” There is a comic song in the (terrific!) musical “Fine and Dandy” (1930) that uses the phrase “check and double check” with reference to Amos 'n Andy. I still don’t completely get the joke in the song, but at least I now have an idea of what the song was getting at. (By the way, a modern day, first-time recording of this show was released on CD a few months ago, and for those interested in popular music of the 1930s it is a wonderful find — like discovering a brand new score by George Gershwin. (Gershwin was, in fact, the boyfriend of Kay Swift, the composer of this show. Her soon to be ex-husband, Paul James, did the lyrics.)
I wonder how they added almost a thousand seats when they re-did the Columbia (1,350 seats) as the Mayfair (2,300 seats)? Just guessing from the various info that’s been posted so far: A) Perhaps the Mayfair seats were a lot smaller than the slightly larger than average Columbia seats?; B) Also, maybe they increased the size of the auditorium by taking away most of the Columbia’s stage? (I think they did something along these lines when Edward Durrell Stone remodeled the Gaiety as the Victoria.)
Still, that seem’s like a really large number of seats to add into the unchanged shell, and footprint, of an auditorium — especially since they didn’t seem to add a balcony (as the original theater had two separate balconies), but may have actually taken a balcony away (as the movie theater had a lodge and mezzanine, and it is unclear whehter this means two different balconies, or the front and back sections of one balcony).
Then, again, since we all know that Radio City Music Hall (and other venues of the time, too) didn’t always have the number of seats they were supposed to, maybe the 2,300 seat info is just PR?
I also wonder about the northward move of the theater’s tunnel lobby entrance. Where can this info be located? If it’s in “before and after” photos of the building, it would be interesting to see if they also redid the second and third floors of the office building when they moved the entrance. I say this because, architecturally speaking, the area above the “old” Columbia Theater entrance looks all “wrong” for an area above a theater’s tunnel lobby entrance, while the area above the Mayfair’s “new” marquee looks the way the area above a tunnel lobby entrance “should” look (e.g., compare it with the area above the Paramount Theater’s entrance).
By the way there are additional photos on the NYPL website of this building and, I believe, the Columbia Theater under construction. I forgot exactly how I found them, but I think you go to the Milstein collection and “scroll” through the collection street by street. (From what I remember, the photos can be accessed “geographically” — at least that’s the way I did it [but I’m not that technically savvy], with the low numbered streets and avenues being shown first.)
The Milstein collection also has some interesting photos of the Roxy under construction, and various other interesting photos of the theater district. (Most of the photos seemed to me to be from the very first third of the 20th Century — with lots of photos of brownstones (that were eventually replaced by theaters, etc.)!
The last name for a short time was Embassy 1-2-3 only because the #1 single screen house had already closed.
Nice four photos Connelly at your link above. Thanks for the treat.
I hope this link works. Someone on another theater’s site posted some pictures from the NY Public Library. The link above (if it works…) is the Mayfair from 1935. The stone work above the marquee is still intact at the theater though part of it is now obscured by the large billboard.
If you can’t get to it, go to the NY Public Library’s digital photo website View link and search away. They’ve got some awesome pictures of the Capitol and The Roxy, ones I’ve never seen before!
Warren, I actually asked Mr. Gray about his comment regarding theaters and that they don’t work well as subjects. Here is what his reply was (received this afternoon):
“built by corporations, without the "human” touch.
buildings are formula based.
hard to associate specific people to them, except in terms of who played there, which is, for me, always a weak link.
an Eberson atmospheric, the unusual Beacon and Lane (in Staten Island), the complex Sutton Theater (really a bank) – these are the theatre stories which have worked for me.
c"
I like his articles in the Times because he highlights structures that may have otherwise gone unnoticed (sp?). In those terms, The Mayfair fits the bill because it’s virtually invisible now.