Loew's Pitkin Theatre
1501 Pitkin Avenue,
Brooklyn,
NY
11212
1501 Pitkin Avenue,
Brooklyn,
NY
11212
18 people
favorited this theater
Showing 201 - 225 of 337 comments found
small world. I live in NJ now
My father went to ENY VOCATIONAL high, near the Atlantic Avenue station on the Canarsie and Fulton Street elevated lines. I was delivered by a Dr. Joseph Berman whose office was at, I think, 25 Logan St. near Jamaica Avenue.
I went to HS at ENY VOCATIONAL Logan and Wells 1 block from Liberty Ave
I’m from Bushwick and Ridgewood myself. My father was from Bushwick but he knew Pitkin Avenue from about the Pitkin, past Rockway Avenue, to about Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sutter and Strauss 3 blocks from the Pitkin 1937 thru 1959
Thanks, Herbie, what was your old neighborhood ?
since you are probably from my old neighborhood I forgive you.
Yes, that was rather tasteless and cynical of me. I apologize.
P.Koch
Do you still have your arm bands?
a.k.a., “Oy Gut Gevalt, There Goes The Neighborhood !”
Co-directed by David Susskind and Steven Spielberg.
“This week’s current social controversy is brought to you by …”
Herbie, you’re not a Volkswagen, are you ?
Ah, Brownsville : militant and criminal blacks vs. corny old show business and Garment District Jews !
Tune in next week for yet another episode of that ever-popular Marxist game, “Class Struggle” !
Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel !
Directed by Spike Lee.
It’s better than Ghettopoly !
Thanks, Herbie, laugh riots are better than race riots.
Nary a dry eye or seat in the house, eh ?
Hopkinson theatre was on Hopkinson between Sutter and Pitkin.
I lived on Sutter and Strauss. Used to go there for 5 hour laugh riots.
Herbie
Who owns this theatre? I would love to see the inside and pictures on how it looks now. Maybe someone can do a documentary of closed theatres in new york and they can show us the insides.
Kris
alkan, have you looked for “Brein’s Theater” on this site, or on Cinematour ?
I’m not sure it was a Yiddish theater, but, when I was riding my bike down Pitkin Avenue a few years ago, I noticed an old building perhaps 15 blocks east of the Loew’s Pitkin that had “Brein’s Theater” carved into the stonework over its front door. Has anyone heard of this place before? Its name certainly sounds like it could have been a Yiddish theater once upon a time. (As I remember, it is some sort of church now.
Thanks, Warren.
To the best of my knowledge, Loew’s Pitkin was never part of the “Yiddish Theater scene in Brooklyn.” But the borough had some Yiddish playhouses, including the Hopkinson and Parkway.
Thank you, Sylvia. Please, where is the Manhattan JCC that the Folksbiene now does its productions at ?
I know there used to be a thriving Yiddish Theater scene around Second Avenue and East 7th St. in Manhattan (corrections welcome).
Was there ever a Yiddish Theater scene in Brooklyn, perhaps at Loew’s Pitkin ? Not off-topic at all.
Off-topic.Yiddish theater is still alive and well. New Yorkers can check out the Folksbiene, now in its 90th consecutive year, doing productions at the Manhattan JCC.
Sylvia Schildt
Thanks, Robert R !
“Rosemary’s Baby” at the Pitkin ! Oy gevalt ! Meine Yiddische Mama, Ruth Gordon, mit der dybbuk ! Whatever happened to the Yiddish Theater ?
29 screens among the plexes in Brooklyn any more ? Someone more ambitious than me, can count them !
Check out this ad for “Rosemary’s Baby”, it shows the Pitkin was open as late as 1968. Can you believe it’s playing in 29 theatres just in Brooklyn? Are there even 29 screens among the plexes in Brooklyn anymore?
View link
Thanks for your answer, Sylvia, and thank you, alkan, for YOUR post.
The closest thing Ridgewood had to the Kishke King was the hot dog and knish stand at the “depot” : Myrtle Wyckoff and Palmetto, intersection of M and L subways, and start of the B26, B38, B52, B54, Q55, and Q58 bus lines. A bit fancier was Gottlieb’s Jewish Deli Restaurant on the north side of Myrtle, just to the east of the depot, between Palmetto and Woodbine. I grew up in Ridgewood on Jewish deli food, among other kinds of food.
Did you ever go to Knish Nosh on Queens Blvd. in Forest Hills, near the 67th Avenue subway station ?
Spring and summer 1968 my mother went to a doctor on East 98th St. near the Rutland Road IRT el station, between, I believe, Clarkson and Winthrop, so I got to know that area, on the cusp between Brownsville and East Flatbush, a bit. I think there was a small Jewish deli restaurant there that had all kinds of knishes, kasha and groats and maybe spinach, as well as potato, the round kind with a burned-looking crust, like the ones at Canarsie Pier, as opposed to Gabila’s knishes, “King Of Potato Pies”, which were more common, and looked like golden-brown square pillows with sharp corners.
Reading these most recent posts, I feel a little bit young. At the age of 57, this is definitely not the way I feel all of the time. As I said earlier, I live in Crown Heights, so I am still close enough to have passed by the Pitkin many times in recent years. I went to movies mostly at the Pitkin and the Sutter.
At the Pitkin, I distinctly remember seeing Teahouse of the August Moon and Around the World in Eighty Days. I’m sure I saw many others, but perhaps they remain in my mind because they were both fairly “adult†films and I was still quite young at the time they played there. Like you, Sylvia and Beverly, I also remember those clouds and stars in the Pitkin’s ceiling.
Outside the theatre, I definitely remember the store selling coconut milk. I remember begging my mother many times to let me buy some. When she eventually gave in, I remember thinking how terrible it tasted and wondering why I had wanted it in the first place. It must have had something to do with those carved coconut heads.
I also remember the Brooklyn Women’s Hospital. I lived directly across the street from it at 1402 Eastern Parkway. The hospital began an expansion on the Eastern Parkway side sometime around 1957 -58. (I’m fairly sure of the date since this is when we moved out of the area.) Apparently because of changes in the neighborhood, this expansion halted in midstream. For many years, the iron expansion skeleton stood there looking quite forlorn. I gather that the hospital closed years ago, but I don’t know when. Just in the past year, however, the skeleton was removed and the hospital was rehabbed into apartments with its entrance on the Lincoln Place side. It’s too bad they did not make a nice entrance on the Eastern Parkway side.
Several comments —
I got to the subway but unable to access the images yet — will work on it.
Schildt in this case is Dutch — my late husband was from Holland — it can mean a picture or a shield in the medieval sense of a coat of arms or it can mean a sign.
I saw your allusion to Hoffman’s — there was a sit-down restaurant and a very popular cafeteria — eating out was not in the family budget, so I think I only ate there once or twice. But of course I passed in front of it thousands of times – there were always people (mainly men) milling in front of it with toothpicks in their mouths. It was a kind of social hangout. And if memory doesn’t fail me, there was an upstairs, which occasionally served as a shul for the High Holy Days.
Henrietta was the continuous live performer — but I do remember there was also vaudeville – I have seen Buck and Bubbles, The Ritz Brothers and I forget who else. What I remember clearly was a marquee sign
5 VAUDEVILLE 5
Acts Acts
The vaudeville show, when offered, and the movie line-up were included in the price of admission.
Saturday afternoon was mostly Loew’s Pitkin Day for kids in the neighborhood, unless we were really turned off by the main attraction.
The line-up was normally a main top run movie, followed by a B-movie. There were also serials which we called the “chapters” like “The Perils of Pauline” which featured cliffhanger installments, typically 12, one each weekend. There were the cartoons, specially selected short subjects, travbelogues, and of course the Paramount News. We would show up when the lineup started – around noon – I carried a bag of sandwiches and fruits – along with money for drinks and candy TO SHARE (nonpareils were a favorite) and I doled the food out in bits all through Saturday afternoon. All of this would end about 5- 5:30 when they through the kids out. We sat, all 5 of us, in a special children’s section monitored by a matron and usher. If we wanted to see the main feature over again, we would split up and sneak one by one over to the adults section and glom onto a grown-up, who would agree to say we were with him or her. That way, we could finish by 6:30 or 7, just in time for supper. A great day for 25 cents apiece minus treats.
Kishke King was a place – a deli on Rockaway and Pitkin that sold kishke and knishes (Jewish style – no pork) and foot-long hot dogs. You took your purchases home or ate them in the street — long before fast food. My Kishke King story is about their long-standing promise to give out free foot-long hot dogs if the Dodgers ever won the World Series and I was there the day they made good their promise —a mob scene!!! The lines wound several times around the block.