Music Palace

This was also at one time known as the Universal, located at 93 Bowery, New York, NY.

The Music Palace, the last of the Chinatown movie houses, closed for business sometime around 1999 or 2000, with the building which housed it to be torn down for a new retail/residential development. Those plans, however, fell through and the Music Palace, its lower exterior covered with graffiti, is still sitting there, awaiting whatever fate may lie ahead for it.

The Music Palace is the subject of a nine-minute documentary (titled 'Music Palace'), directed by Eric Lin and showing as part of the 2005 New Directors/New Films series. It focuses on the Music Palace's three caretakers and their ruminations during the theatre's final days. (Showings - on the same bill as Zhu Wen's feature-length dramatic feature, 'South of the Clouds' - are scheduled for the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday, March 31, at 8:30 pm and at MoMA Saturday, April 2 at 3:15 pm; more information about purchasing tickets and about ND/NF in general can be found here: http://www.filmlinc.com/ndnf/index.html.)

There is a photo of the Music Palace theater here:
http://www.urban75.org/photos/newyork/ny83.html

Great exterior photo, but I seriously doubt that Catatonia, as the person who posted the image lostmemory linked to, was scheduled to play the Music Palace; the Music Palace was strictly a film venue, with perhaps (and I'm only guessing) an occasional stint as a host to various live Chinese cultural performances.

Good point br91975. That photo claims to be from 2003. Here is a link that lists the Music Palace as closing in June of 2000. I guess that person was going to play to an empty house. :)
http://members.aol.com/hkfilms/

One more photo:
http://www.ece.rutgers.edu/~gocky/images/palace2.jpg

I caught that screening of "Music Palace" and I didn't realize that it was filmed several years ago. I had thought all those Chinatown movie palaces had closed years ago and even knowing that 1999/2000 I thought they had be gone by then.

I never went to any of these venues, but once in awhile I'll read a review and people will say Hong Kong fare played in one of these venues. Were the films that played in these venues subtitled? And how many Chinatown theatres were there. I know there was at least several of them.

Listed as the Universal Theatre in Film Daily Yearbooks that I have 1930 thru 1950. This theatre seemed to grow in size with a seating capacity given in 1930 as 281, in 1941 as 450, in 1943 and 1950 as 546. It is not listed in the 1957 edition of F.D.Y.

Listed as the Universal Theatre in the Film Daily Yearbook, 1926 edition with a seating capacity of 245.

The 1931 Certificate of Occupancy for the facility showed a total seating capacity of 556 (411 floor and 146 balcony, plus a small allowance for standing room!).
It was also known as the World Theater for a time.

This website has photos and some background on the Music Palace.

The theatre was open, as the Universal, as early as 1919.

the 9 minute music palace documentary is screening again on july 18th at 8:45 pm at the Quad in nyc as part of the 29th Asian American International Film Festival, which is also screening 6 rare movies that were rescued from the Sun Sing before it was demolished. My partner and I have 45 feature films, 60 shorts, tickets, uniforms, theatre memorabilia and close to 10,000 lobby cards and posters from Sun Sing. and some Music Palace memorabilia too. For more information please contact ic@inspectorcollector.com

This is a paragraph from a New York Times article dated June 14, 1998 about the Music Palace closing.

"One by one, the movie houses disappeared. The Pagoda was demolished in 1992 and replaced by the Glory China Tower office building. The Sun Sing, which closed in 1993, is still vacant. The Rosemary closed in 1996; it is now a Buddhist shrine".

The entire article can be found at this link.

Yeah the Rosemary is now a huge Buddhist temple, around the corner near the Manhattan Bridge.

The Music Palace was the seediest of the three big Chinatown theatres that were still in operation through most of the 90s.

Everyone smoked cigarettes during the movies, although they did have a black security guard who would occasionally walk the aisles, halfheartedly saying "no smoking" in English and Cantonese.

The balcony of the Music Palace was pretty rough. A lot of the Chinese gang kids would hang out there, drinking beer and smoking. There were fights pretty regularly, and one guy got shot while I was there.

They mainly played kung fu movies, although they'd sometimes show Honk Kong comedies and romances, and an occasional 'Category 3' (porno) flick. All the movies were (poorly) subtitled in English, as well as in Chinese for speakers of dialects other than Cantonese.
The small concession stand sold packets of dried shrimp and shit like that.

Here is a recent photo of the former Music Palace.

After several years of lying in wait, the Music Palace has been demolished, presumably to be replaced by the retail/residential development which first came into discussion in the late '90s.

I hear that the structure going up on the site will be a hotel.

Does anyone have date when it operated as the WORLD?