Central Plaza Cinema
2630 Central Park Avenue,
Yonkers,
NY
2630 Central Park Avenue,
Yonkers,
NY
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The Central Plaza is a shopping center theatre that opened in the 60’s. Originally seating 1900 in the orchestra and balcony, the theatre was twinned, triplexed, then finally quadded (2 up-250 each, 2 down-600 each). It still features its original GC “CINEMA” sign on the roof, and toward the front of the lobby you can feel that the floor is hollow—it’s covering the original lobby fountain.
Contributed by
Joe Masher
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Recent comments (view all 20 comments)
…and that same VP came on board at Loews about 6-8 months before AMc took them over…
Hey dave-bronx,
Was their Totowa cinema identical to Central Plaza?
And did it and any other area GCC theaters have the same waterfall like Central Plaza ?
Thank You.
Drop me a line soon at , I had ushered at Hartsdale 2.
Dear bigred and dave-bronx:
I appreciate all your comments on the former GCC sites.
Thankyou.
The Totowa Cinema was similar to this one. I only saw it a couple of times passing by on the bus but I never went inside. As I recall it had the same tall glass lobby, and the CINEMA letters on the roof were the red cut-outs not the black-on-white as they are here. I think Totowa was a little newer.
If you go up to the second floor lobby, you can peek through the ceiling tiles and see the original lobby ceiling another 10 feet or so higher—it looks like upside-down pyramids, about 4X4 each.
This place wasn’t on my radar at all until now.
Whether it originally seated 1300-1400 or 1900, that’s big in any case for a theater built during this time period — larger than Westwood Village’s National, Pasadena’s Hastings and Manhattan’s “new” Ziegfeld, and rivaling Manhattan’s Astor Plaza and National.
The recently demolished National in Westwood Village was frequently cited as one of the last theaters of its size to be built. I wonder just how many single-screen cinemas with 1000+ seats were built in the Sixties and Seventies, after all.
Can anyone think of other examples? (There’s no seating capacity info given for the Totowa Cinema mentioned above. Was it really this large?)
stevebob,
Yes, Central Plaza was that BIG and Century’s Mall theater in nearby New Rochelle, NY seated about 12-1300. You might want to start a separate posting about 1960’s and 70’s single screen theaters that had large amounts of seating. One of the Century 1960’s theaters in Long Island ( possibly Valley Stream) had slightly over 2000 seats!!
General Cinema’s Menlo Park single screen in Edison, NJ probably was up there too with it’s huge original seat count.
“…and that same VP came on board at Loews about 6-8 months before AMc took them over…”
Does this mean that AMC was involved in shady activity?
It was certainly a big coincidence, other than that I couldn’t say. He retired after the merger, and didn’t go back to amc.
This was never an AMC Theatre. After General Cinema went under this became (and still is) a Clearview Cinemas theatre.