Penn Newsreel Theatre
219 West 34th Street,
New York,
NY
10123
219 West 34th Street,
New York,
NY
10123
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I never knew of this cinema’s existence until yesterday, when I happened on a few old newspaper clippings in a file at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library. Catering to the many thousands who passed through nearby Pennsylvania Station every day, the Penn Newsreel Theatre occupied the ground floor of a two-story building that extended from 34th to 35th Streets.
Designed by the architectural firm of Roche & Roche, it first opened on September 9, 1938, presenting hourly programs of newsreels and short subjects from 9AM to midnight. Checking facilities were provided for train travelers' luggage and shoppers' packages. In the lobby, poster cases displayed schedules for all trains serving Pennsylvania Station, including the Long Island Rail Road.
A month after opening, labor problems erupted with the stage hands' union, which wanted the theatre’s management to hire two of its members, at a weekly salary of $68 each. When the union set up a picket line in front of the theatre, management countered with a spokesman costumed as William Penn, who told passers-by that the theatre was too small to require stage hands and that they would only be changing lightbulbs, a job presently done by the janitors. I don’t know what happened after that, but I suspect that the Penn Newsreel Theatre didn’t last very long. I’ve not been able to find a listing for it in my collection of Film Daily Year Books.
Contributed by
Warren G. Harris
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Recent comments (view all 4 comments)
This site has a few other trainâ€"station newsreel and short-subject theatres listed:
Grand Central Theatre, New York
South Station Theatre, Boston
Newsreel Theatre, Cincinnati
Victoria Station News Theatre, London
Cineac Montparnasse, Paris
Cineac Saint Lazare, Paris
Here’s a September 1938 ad for the short-lived Penn Newsreel, which had boxoffices on both 34th and 35th Streets. One wonders how many patrons entered on 35th, which was not a shopping street and consisted mostly of office buildings catering to the garment industry: View link
This is a free preview of a NY Times story dated February 19, 1938.
WILL BUILD MOVIE HOUSE; Group Leases Part of Coburg Hotel on West 34th St.
A group headed by Stanley Heller and Joseph Steiner have leased for ten years part of the Coburg Hotel, at 219 West Thirty-fourth Street, and a plot fronting seventy-five feet to the rear, on West Thirty-fifth Street, and will shortly erect thereon a motion picture theatre for the showing of newsreels and short subjects.
A Boxoffice Magazine item of June 24, 1939, contains the terse line “The Penn Newsreel on 34th St. has been demolished.” I wonder if the building itself was knocked down, or if it was merely gutted and converted to some other use? It sounds from the description in the Times that the part of the theater on 35th Street at least had been newly built. It seems unlikely that a new building would have been destroyed unless the site was wanted by a developer for a much larger building.