Embassy Cinema
125 Park Avenue,
New York,
NY
10017
125 Park Avenue,
New York,
NY
10017
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The Airlines name makes even more sense now. Seating and location all match although the mailing address was once on 42nd street. This theatre opened on October 18, 1940 as the Airlines Newsreel and had the same publicity agent as the Grand central Newsreel inside the terminal.
From 1949 it was a late run double feature house. In February 1951, after the Loew’s 42nd Street (aka Murray Hill) had closed, this became Brandt’s Murray Hill.
Airlines and Murray Hill should be added as aka names.
The cinema can be seen to the extreme right of this view of the Airlines Terminal building. Instead of a marquee, the Embassy had an attraction board over the entrance. This photo also suggests that there was no entrance to the cinema on the Park Avenue side of the terminal building.
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The 1943 Film Daily Year Book lists a Newsreel Theatre at 74 E. 42nd street as well as the aforementioned Air Lines theatre at 42nd and Park.
Does anyone know if all three theatres were the same?
This is listed as the AIR LINES theatre in the 1942 Film daily Year Book.
Renewing link.
In 1952, this was apparently known as Brandt’s Murray Hill and running double-bills of foreign imports and Hollywood reissues:
www.i8.photobucket.com/albums/a18/Warrengwhiz/parkmurray.jpg
The address for the Embassy Newsreel Theatre was 74 East 42nd Street, and it contained 527 seats, according to the 1945 edition of the Motion Picture Theatre Directory published by the New York Film Board of Trade.
I believe the address for this location was 125 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
Listed as Embassy Theatre (1560 Broadway).
Can someone tell me where on this site I could find the listing for what is now the Times Square Visitors Center? I see it mentioned all over the place and it’s not listed under The Embassy.
This theatre should not be described as “closed.” It was demolished decades ago and no longer exists except in memory.
No, the “welcome center” on Broadway is another theatre, probably listed here as the Embassy, which was its original name. Designed by Thomas W. Lamb, it started out as a conventional movie house, but was later switched to a newsreel policy. At the end of the newsreel era, it returned to showing feature movies.
Is this the theater that’s a Times square “welcome” center? If so, it still looks remarkably like a theater inside.
The Embassy was a 527-seat newsreel theatre directly across the street from Grand Central Station, and not to be confused with an even smaller one inside the terminal itself. If I recall correctly, this Embassy Newsreel was part of an airlines terminal that got torn down for an office building. The entrance was on 42nd Street, just west of Park Avenue. The new building had public exhibition space run by the Whitney Museum, but I don’t know if that still exists…After the arrival of daily TV news broadcasts, most of the Embassy newsreel theatres switched to feature movies, some in the “art” category.
Could this have been the same place as the Grand Central Theatre which is listed elsewhere?