Bijou Cinema
100 Third Avenue,
New York,
NY
10003
100 Third Avenue,
New York,
NY
10003
3 people
favorited this theater
I believe this theatre opened in the 1930’s with live plays. In the 1960’s it was turned into the Jewel Theatre which played all male films when they left the Adonis. In the 1980’s it was re-named the Bijou and continued to play male XXX films. In 1988 the city closed it down.
It was remodeled and re-named the Cinema Village Third Avenue with the revival format moving here when the owner of the Cinema Village tried to make that an X house (with the name Cinema 12). That lasted less than three months and the original Cinema Village returned with independant films for a short time using the Cinema 12 name and then Cinema Village.
This theatre then changed it’s name back to the Bijou Cinema and switched to a first run format opening with “War of the Roses”. By 1992 with all the competition from the new Loews Village and Village East, the theatre quietly went back to adult films.
Contributed by
RobertR
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Recent comments (view all 45 comments)
Sorry for the double post! (And I should have said WHICH the New York Times has for sale…)
Brooklyn Jim asked me to post this photo here….
I originally posted it under the wrong Lyric….sorry Jim! So here it is…
Click here for photo
…and to think that sweet little ‘Annie Warbucks’ went to the Variety in the mid 1990s!!!
This location was advertising as the Star-Comet in 1923.
This from the book THE TRANSFORMATION OF CINEMA (Eileen Bowser).
“In September 1910 a WORLD reporter visiting the Comet at Third Avenue near Twelfth Street in New York’s Lower East Side tenement district approved the lighting conditions there. He wrote there was enough diffused light to read by, yet the screen was bright. Men, women and children filled the hall. He also approved the ventilating system and reported that an usher wandered the aisles spraying a sweet-smelling liquid. Unfortunately, he added, they ran ‘junk’ films- a Vitagraph and a Selig missing their titles, recognized by their trademarks on the sets and believed to be a year old.”
The city was still trying to close this down in 1995 and may have succeeded then.
In March 1964 this was shut down (along with the Gramercy) for showing ‘unlicensed avant-garde films’.
It was then known as the Sans Souci Pocket Theatre
I was at a playhouse last night, address is 136 E.13th Street. It’s between 3rd and 4th avenues. In the lobby was a placard detailing the history of the place. It dates from the 1850’s when it was a livery stable. It then became the Lyric Theatre, first a Vaudeville then a movie theatre. I cannot find this theatre on this site. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
MarkieS, sounds like it could have been part of the Theatre Unique but I haven’t seen any sign it was ever called the Lyric.
Only trouble with that supposition, Al, is that the Theatre Unique was on the block bounded by East 13th and East 14th Streets between 3rd and 4th Avenues. An address of 136 East 13th Street would be on the south side of the street in the next block down, bounded by East 13th and East 12th Streets. Since this is the block on which the Bijou was located, it’s possible that the space accessed through that East 13th Street entrance by MarkieS was indeed a part of the old Bijou. Lyric is one of the former names listed above.