Lights! Camera! Northern Brooklyn!

posted by Michael Zoldessy on October 1, 2008 at 7:45 am

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN, NY — A new theatre is sprouting up in the Williamsburg-Greenport area with a unique setup. It will be built beneath condos in a retrofitted warehouse.

Since 2002, Williamsburg-Greenpoint has lived without a movie theater. The absence is especially surprising given the area’s history of film exhibition: At one point, the neighborhoods boasted six movie theaters in less than five square miles. But since the 1950s, the theaters have been slowly disappearing, converted to other uses or demolished.

“If you’re making some amount of money showing movies there,” said Patrick Crowley, the co-founder of cinematreasures.org, a Wikipedia-like site devoted to cinema preservation, “and a developer says, ‘I can give you a ton of money to have development on top of the theater,’ then it’s hard to say no to that.”

Read more in the Observer.