Fabian Theatre
45 Church Street,
Paterson,
NJ
07505
45 Church Street,
Paterson,
NJ
07505
6 people
favorited this theater
Jacob Fabian, who’d introduced Passaic County’s first facility built exclusively for the exhibition of moving pictures in 1914 (Passaic’s Regent), opened the Fabian Theatre in 1925 with a showing of the silent feature, “We Moderns”. The theater was built at a site ravaged by the Silk City’s great fire of 1902.
The Fabian Theatre, designed by architect Fred Wesley Wentworth in the Sullivanesque style, was originally envisioned as a stand-alone theater, and the large office building and the Alexander Hamilton Hotel which enclose it were added as afterthoughts.
The theater featured the Fabian Mammoth Organ (a Wurlitzer), played by Warren Yates, who’d previously served as Chief Organist at Newark’s Wentworth-designed Branford Theater. (Yates was the last organist recorded by the Phonograph Division of Thomas A. Edison Inc. The recordings were made at the Fabian on 9/26/29 and 10/3/29, just weeks before the company went out of business. Records were manufactured but never released.) The facility also featured a 500-bulb, two-ton chandelier, murals, tile floors, performances by the Fabian Grand Orchestra, and Turkish baths in the basement.
In addition to featuring films and vaudeville, the theater, which maintained its single screen and 3,000+ seats until the mid-1970’s, was site of several Abbott and Costello film premieres. Among these were 1940’s “One Night in the Tropics”, 1950’s “Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion”, and their first color feature, 1952’s “Jack and the Beanstalk”. Allegedly Lou Costello, a Paterson native, had demanded that Universal Pictures provide the ‘hometown premieres’ of the two earlier films.
Also of note, in 1948, the Reverend Charles Tarter, a civil rights pioneer and charter member of the Paterson NAACP, broke the theater’s color barrier when he repeatedly took a seat in the building’s first floor lobby, rather than acquiesce to the facility’s rule that blacks were only permitted to sit upstairs.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the theater was multiplexed with, first, the main level being twinned and the balcony being turned into its own auditorium and, later, the addition of two screens on the stage. Despite these last gasp efforts, as well as a brief return to its former glory when it hosted the 1989 premiere of “Lean on Me”, the story of Paterson high school principal Joe Clark, the theater closed in 1993 after a screening of “RoboCop 3”.
In January 2004, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection approved the demolition of the theater. The owner/developer is now required to provide Historic American Buildings Survey-level documentation, an archival record, and a museum-quality interpretive exhibit documenting the theater’s history to the Department’s Historic Preservation Office.
The theater site has long been intended to house new office space and parking for the Paterson Board of Education. Recent reports of severe mismanagement of funds cast doubt upon this scenario and the state’s Department of Education will review the true costs of such a plan and investigate alternative sites. Preservation and restoration of the Fabian are still possible.
Contributed by
Damien Farley, Mark Sellitti
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Recent comments (view all 111 comments)
As it is a completely new theater, the Fabian 8 has its own page here on CT: /theaters/29149/
History about Jacob Fabian and several photos (including one of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City) can be found here: http://fredwesleywentworth.com/7.html
A good current interior shot in color is here: View link
Too bad such a once proud theater is wasting away. A shame!
Actually, those are old photos. I think the theater is gutted at this point (they were gutting it earlier this year when I was there).
I just got back from Paterson. They are gutting the Fabian. Several entryways are opened (with gates down) and you can look into the cavernous auditorium. The seats are out and they appear to be leveling the floor.
Ironic how the two flagships of the Fabian chain (this and the Montauk in Passaic) survived this long, only to meet their demise simultaneously!
I always wanted to go here before it closed — they had some dynamite exploitation double features.
And that shot posted on August 17, 2010 must be the balcony after the theater was divided.
What’s the street view looking at? Is that an alternate entrance to theater’s 4 and 5 in the former stage area? Hardly looks like the 1920’s facade I’d have imagined.
At current viewing, certain words in the introduction are printed in green and underlined. Are those booby traps of some sort? I’m terrified of clicking on them and contracting a computer virus. It seems to be happening all over this website.
Tinseltoes, I don’t see any of these green underlined words. Ed Solero, you are right, that is an odd entrance. Someone else would have to say if that is the original one or not, but doesn’t the Fabian only now the upper balcony part of the theater with a fake ceiling put through the orchestra level? With the orchestra level converted to some other use? That could also mean that those “other use” entrances are from the original theater entrance and the “theater” using the balcony (at least when it was open yet) using a different entrance.