Thanks for the link, ElaineW. How did you like Karl B’s other recollections ?
I’m not sure how you could get that 2004 subway calendar, or how I or anyone else could get that image to you.
Try :
I went to both the new and old Cross Bay Theaters. They both have pages on this site. My first time to the old Cross Bay, June 1975, my dad and I saw a double feature of “Flesh Gordon” and “The Groove Tube” and laughed ourselves sore and silly.
My first time to the new Cross Bay was Easter Eve, Saturday March 30 1991 to see “The Silence Of The Lambs”. I took the B-18 bus from Ridgewood to Cypress Hills and walked from the end of that bus line, past “The First / Last Bar in Brooklyn” (on the Bklyn-Queens border) southeast on Rockaway Blvd to the new Cross Bay, with the sun setting behind me and a huge full moon rising in front of me !
ElaineW, you probably passed the Bayside and Acacia Cemeteries on your walk to the Cross Bay.
Thank you all for these details, and my special thanks to BklynJim for recently going there in person, and reporting on what is there now. Tapeshare, your photos, old and recent, really put it into perspective for me. My thanks to you.
The zip code for the Gotham at the top of this page, 11237, is wrong (that’s Wyckoff Heights, not East New York) and should be 11207.
I’m going to the Liberty / former Madison this Friday, or, at least I plan to. One thought right here : the stairs up from the street level to the furniture dept. must have once been an exit staircase descending from the balcony mezzanine to the outer lobby, as in the Ridgewood Theater. They seem much too close to the front to have been the grand staircase from the far end of the inner lobby up to the balcony mezzanine.
Yes, Bway, the Ridgewood probably isn’t all that different from when you were last there in 1991, because it looked about the same as it was when I was last there Saturday Sept. 12 1992.
ElaineW, my two main memories of that area as a kid in the 1960’s were : 1) taking the subway from Ridgewood to Rockaway and enjoying it coming up out of the ground between Grant Avenue and 80th Street.
2) Once my dad had a car, riding home from Rockaway Beach west on Conduit Blvd., looking north to Liberty Avenue, and seeing the el get lower and lower until my last view of it slanting down into the ground, then a view of “Municipal Parking : Grant Avenue”.
Before that, there was dual service for awhile on Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville / ENY from Van Sinderen Avenue to Chestnut Street : the old Fulton el above, and the new IND subway below.
You’re welcome, ElaineW. Too bad I don’t have the “My Recollection” link to post here. But, please take my word for it, Karl B’s stuff on it is well worth reading.
Best wishes on your train rides. The one in “North By Northwest” is on the Hudson Line from GCT to Tarrytown, that I now commute on every day. That’s real Hudson Valley scenery that you see out the train windows, while Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are talking.
Grant Avenue IND subway connection : There was an image of that in the 2004 NYC Subway calendar (March). The photo is dated April 22, 1956, and looks southwest from 80th (Hudson) Street. To the right is the Grant Avenue station of the old BMT Liberty Avenue / Pitkin Avenue / Fulton St. el. To the left are the tracks coming up from the new Grant Avenue IND subway station. In between is a house with an ad for Hamburg Savings Bank on it, probably the branch at Fulton and Crescent Sts. Sorry I can’t post a link to it here.
Thanks, BrooklynJim. Good to see you back here on CT, and glad you made it back safely to the “left” coast !
“Karl B” has a great story, among four others, on the “My Recollection” website, about “The best dentist in Brooklyn”, Dr. Brnjamin Dunaif, at the northwest corner of Liberty and Grant Avenues, not far from where the Earl Theatre once was.
A macabre story of two motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, shiv-shaving, eye-gouging, arm-twisting, chain-lashing, scalpel-flashing, acid-throwing, gun-shooting, bone-breaking, pathological nuts and their pal the UNDERTAKER…
The diner on the triangle formed by Woodbine, Myrtle and St. Nicholas, once known as the Madison and then the Castillo Diner, that frankie, BrooklynJim and I ate at on Saturday August 25th 2007, after seeing “The Bourne Ultimatum” at the Ridgewood, is now known as “Las Montas” (Spanish for “the mountains” ?)
Thanks, guys, for all your input. I won’t have any more input myself until I’ve been there this coming Friday (postponed from last Friday.
and have had yet another chance to walk and look around inside.
It would be good to have a computerized brain, like The Terminator, to be able to superimpose the stored and downloaded layout of the original interior of the RKO Madison over what one sees now, walking around inside the Liberty Dept. Store at 54-30 Myrtle Avenue, to facilitate making a comparison.
Good point, BklynJim : “The staircases were ancient, too worn to be anything other than the Madison’s original.” I wasn’t sure.
Thanks, Warren, for not giving me the Earl Theater’s # here. ElaineW posted the link anyway. Thanks, ElaineW.
The expression “City Line” is an older one, refers to the Brooklyn-Queens border, and dates from before the incorporation of NYC’s five boroughs in 1898, when Brooklyn was a city in its own right.
Hi, ElaineW. There was, and indeed there still is, a Jahn’s on Hillside Avenue just north of Myrtle Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens. Yes, the Valencia in Jamaica was very impressive. I don’t ever remember being there myself, but have heard about it from my father and from a friend at work.
I wish “Karl B” was here to discuss the Arlington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library with you.
Thanks for your Dr. Catapano story. I’m glad your appendicitis got treated properly. In what hospital was your appendix removed ? The younger of my two uncles almost died from a misdiagnosed inflamed appendix. Fortunately, after it had burst, he was hospitalized quickly enough to save his life and get the sepsis out of his abdominal cavity.
The theater I think of as “the itch” (actually my dad) is the former Decatur Theater in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
ElaineW and MVitale, you certainly know and remember your old neighborhood well ! It’s like the discussions I started on the Ridgewood Theater page in spring and summer 2004.
Where was the Earl Theatre ? Does it have a page on Cinema Treasures ?
“‘The movie will begin in five moments’, the mindless voice announced. ‘All those unseated will await the next show.’
We filed slowly and languidly into the hall. As we seated and were darkened, the voice continued :
‘The program you are about to see is not new; you’ve seen this program through and through, you’ve seen your birth, your life, and death, you might remember all the rest.
‘Did you have a good world when you died, enough to base a movie on ?“”
I’ve commented that I’ve literally been in funeral homes that were brighter and livelier and had more people in them than Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Richmond Hill. Maybe my next step will be to find a movie theater that is like that. The Ridgewood came close last Saturday, with only five of us watching the 1:20 PM screening of “The Bourne Ultimatum”, in darkness and almost complete silence.
The film, “Tales From The ‘Hood”, also comes to mind in this context, in which an inner city funeral director reveals to local gang members how a few of his recent clients met their grisly and bizarre deaths.
Also Jim Morrison’s poem, “The Movie”, from his “American Prayer” album, also seen and heard at the start of the 1991 Oliver Stone film, “The Doors”, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
“The theater did deteriorate fast in between the movie era and the roller rink era, when it was the rock concert venue, the outside looked like hell in that time.”
Appropriate to apperances by Richard Hell and the Voidoids !
“ … and the beautiful old stained glass light fixtures were gone, just marks where they once were, in a sea of blackness.”
This is what I remember of the interior of the RKO Madison Theater :
I remember the inner lobby as about six times as long (parallel to Madison Street) as it was wide (parallel to Wyckoff Avenue). The grand staircase up to the balcony was at the far end, close to the Wyckoff Avenue wall. The ceiling was very high, and from its center must have hung the grand chandelier. Either there, or over the forward half of the orchestra seats. There may have been a large mirror on the wall at the head of the grand staircase. The grand staircase may have had an intermediate landing, from which it divided in two (left and right) in completing its ascent to the balcony level, and the mirror may have hung on the wall of this landing. There were also mirrors behind the refreshment counter in the inner lobby. I remember seeing myself in one of them in January 1969 before getting seated to see “Dracula Has Risen From The Grave”.
I remember the balcony floor area (outside the seats) as extensive. I don’t have memories of walking around the balcony railing (marble balustrade ?) and looking down into the inner lobby, or of walking up that grand staircase. I DO remember, on Tuesday Sept. 6, 1966, while seeing “Die, Monster, Die !” there with my father, getting up from my balcony seat to go to the men’s room, and walking over tiled floors past old-fashioned underlit “pointing hand” signs for restrooms and telephones (in booths). The men’s room was long and narrow, the length at right angles to Myrtle Avenue, with a window onto Myrtle Avenue at its end, on the western side of the façade.
I remember the balcony seating area as roughly half the size of the orchestra seating area. I remember the ceiling over the rear orchestra seats, directly below the balcony seats, as decorated with ringed half-globes that, to me, looked like the planet Saturn embedded in the ceiling.
I saw similar ceiling decoration in the Corona Plaza Theater on Roosevelt Avenue at 103rd Street when I saw the Matthew Broderick – Jean Reno “Godzilla” there in late May 1998.
Looking forward to the Madison’s screen, I remember the “opera boxes” on the sides, and a small blue-white luminous clock on the wall, above and to the left of the screen.
Other than “Die, Monster, Die !” I remember sitting in the balcony for only two other films, “The Odd Couple” and “The Green Berets”, both summer 1968, the latter, August 2nd. I remember that date because I saw that movie then, instead of a Doors concert at the Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadow Park. I was probably better off with the movie, as I’ve read about that Doors concert turning into a near-riot. I probably sat in the balcony then so that the adult I was with (dad, mom) could smoke.
I remember the outer lobby as opulent, mirrored, with a tiled floor, covered with corrugated rubber runners, and of course with lobby cards on the walls, and maybe also with sandwich board signs for upcoming films scattered about the floor. Although the outer lobby seemed spacious, it probably only amounted to maybe one-ninth the total floor area of the theater.
I remember the inner lobby carpet as either dark maroon, with maybe an Oriental design, or dark maroon and green with a fern leaf design. I remember the inner lobby carpet gradually being obscured by shoe-blackened discarded chewing gum, just like a city sidewalk outside a candy store.
Thanks for the link, ElaineW. How did you like Karl B’s other recollections ?
I’m not sure how you could get that 2004 subway calendar, or how I or anyone else could get that image to you.
Try :
I went to both the new and old Cross Bay Theaters. They both have pages on this site. My first time to the old Cross Bay, June 1975, my dad and I saw a double feature of “Flesh Gordon” and “The Groove Tube” and laughed ourselves sore and silly.
My first time to the new Cross Bay was Easter Eve, Saturday March 30 1991 to see “The Silence Of The Lambs”. I took the B-18 bus from Ridgewood to Cypress Hills and walked from the end of that bus line, past “The First / Last Bar in Brooklyn” (on the Bklyn-Queens border) southeast on Rockaway Blvd to the new Cross Bay, with the sun setting behind me and a huge full moon rising in front of me !
ElaineW, you probably passed the Bayside and Acacia Cemeteries on your walk to the Cross Bay.
Thank you all for these details, and my special thanks to BklynJim for recently going there in person, and reporting on what is there now. Tapeshare, your photos, old and recent, really put it into perspective for me. My thanks to you.
The zip code for the Gotham at the top of this page, 11237, is wrong (that’s Wyckoff Heights, not East New York) and should be 11207.
I’m going to the Liberty / former Madison this Friday, or, at least I plan to. One thought right here : the stairs up from the street level to the furniture dept. must have once been an exit staircase descending from the balcony mezzanine to the outer lobby, as in the Ridgewood Theater. They seem much too close to the front to have been the grand staircase from the far end of the inner lobby up to the balcony mezzanine.
Yes, Bway, the Ridgewood probably isn’t all that different from when you were last there in 1991, because it looked about the same as it was when I was last there Saturday Sept. 12 1992.
ElaineW, my two main memories of that area as a kid in the 1960’s were : 1) taking the subway from Ridgewood to Rockaway and enjoying it coming up out of the ground between Grant Avenue and 80th Street.
2) Once my dad had a car, riding home from Rockaway Beach west on Conduit Blvd., looking north to Liberty Avenue, and seeing the el get lower and lower until my last view of it slanting down into the ground, then a view of “Municipal Parking : Grant Avenue”.
Before that, there was dual service for awhile on Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville / ENY from Van Sinderen Avenue to Chestnut Street : the old Fulton el above, and the new IND subway below.
You’re welcome, ElaineW. Too bad I don’t have the “My Recollection” link to post here. But, please take my word for it, Karl B’s stuff on it is well worth reading.
Best wishes on your train rides. The one in “North By Northwest” is on the Hudson Line from GCT to Tarrytown, that I now commute on every day. That’s real Hudson Valley scenery that you see out the train windows, while Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are talking.
Grant Avenue IND subway connection : There was an image of that in the 2004 NYC Subway calendar (March). The photo is dated April 22, 1956, and looks southwest from 80th (Hudson) Street. To the right is the Grant Avenue station of the old BMT Liberty Avenue / Pitkin Avenue / Fulton St. el. To the left are the tracks coming up from the new Grant Avenue IND subway station. In between is a house with an ad for Hamburg Savings Bank on it, probably the branch at Fulton and Crescent Sts. Sorry I can’t post a link to it here.
Thanks, Bway and Panzer65. No, Bway, I didn’t go in last Friday, but intend to do so this coming Friday.
IF YOUZE GUYS AIN’T FRUM BROOKLYN, OR JOIZEE …
FUGGEDABOUDID !!!!!
Thank YOU, BklynJim ! Glad to read sunny Cal was spared the Bay Ridge-style tornados !
I wonder if John Cameron Swayze and younger Patrick Swayze are related ?
Z-100 !
“It takes a knockin', and keeps on rockin' !”
The other two lines I was trying to recall from “Chuck Berry : Hail Hail Rock ‘N Roll !”
Keith Richards (taunting) : Well, you’re gonna have to live with it [distorted sound in the movie], baby !"
Chuck Berry (indignant, loud) :
“I BEEN LIVIN' WITH IT FOR THIRTY YEARS, MAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Thanks, BrooklynJim. Good to see you back here on CT, and glad you made it back safely to the “left” coast !
“Karl B” has a great story, among four others, on the “My Recollection” website, about “The best dentist in Brooklyn”, Dr. Brnjamin Dunaif, at the northwest corner of Liberty and Grant Avenues, not far from where the Earl Theatre once was.
From the IMDb :
“The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)” :
A macabre story of two motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding, shiv-shaving, eye-gouging, arm-twisting, chain-lashing, scalpel-flashing, acid-throwing, gun-shooting, bone-breaking, pathological nuts and their pal the UNDERTAKER…
Reads lke a Grade Z schlocker classic !
About 10 years too late for the Grandview !
The diner on the triangle formed by Woodbine, Myrtle and St. Nicholas, once known as the Madison and then the Castillo Diner, that frankie, BrooklynJim and I ate at on Saturday August 25th 2007, after seeing “The Bourne Ultimatum” at the Ridgewood, is now known as “Las Montas” (Spanish for “the mountains” ?)
Thanks, guys, for all your input. I won’t have any more input myself until I’ve been there this coming Friday (postponed from last Friday.
and have had yet another chance to walk and look around inside.
It would be good to have a computerized brain, like The Terminator, to be able to superimpose the stored and downloaded layout of the original interior of the RKO Madison over what one sees now, walking around inside the Liberty Dept. Store at 54-30 Myrtle Avenue, to facilitate making a comparison.
Good point, BklynJim : “The staircases were ancient, too worn to be anything other than the Madison’s original.” I wasn’t sure.
Thanks for mentioning this fact, Warren. It makes sense.
Thanks, Warren, for not giving me the Earl Theater’s # here. ElaineW posted the link anyway. Thanks, ElaineW.
The expression “City Line” is an older one, refers to the Brooklyn-Queens border, and dates from before the incorporation of NYC’s five boroughs in 1898, when Brooklyn was a city in its own right.
Hi, ElaineW. There was, and indeed there still is, a Jahn’s on Hillside Avenue just north of Myrtle Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens. Yes, the Valencia in Jamaica was very impressive. I don’t ever remember being there myself, but have heard about it from my father and from a friend at work.
I wish “Karl B” was here to discuss the Arlington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library with you.
Thanks for your Dr. Catapano story. I’m glad your appendicitis got treated properly. In what hospital was your appendix removed ? The younger of my two uncles almost died from a misdiagnosed inflamed appendix. Fortunately, after it had burst, he was hospitalized quickly enough to save his life and get the sepsis out of his abdominal cavity.
The theater I think of as “the itch” (actually my dad) is the former Decatur Theater in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
Good point, Bway. Thanks.
ElaineW and MVitale, you certainly know and remember your old neighborhood well ! It’s like the discussions I started on the Ridgewood Theater page in spring and summer 2004.
Where was the Earl Theatre ? Does it have a page on Cinema Treasures ?
Thanks, saps, glad you know about the IMDb too !
“The Movie”, by Jim Morrison :
“‘The movie will begin in five moments’, the mindless voice announced. ‘All those unseated will await the next show.’
We filed slowly and languidly into the hall. As we seated and were darkened, the voice continued :
‘The program you are about to see is not new; you’ve seen this program through and through, you’ve seen your birth, your life, and death, you might remember all the rest.
‘Did you have a good world when you died, enough to base a movie on ?“”
Thank you, Lost Memory.
While we’re on the subject of funeral homes ….
I’ve commented that I’ve literally been in funeral homes that were brighter and livelier and had more people in them than Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Richmond Hill. Maybe my next step will be to find a movie theater that is like that. The Ridgewood came close last Saturday, with only five of us watching the 1:20 PM screening of “The Bourne Ultimatum”, in darkness and almost complete silence.
The film, “Tales From The ‘Hood”, also comes to mind in this context, in which an inner city funeral director reveals to local gang members how a few of his recent clients met their grisly and bizarre deaths.
Also Jim Morrison’s poem, “The Movie”, from his “American Prayer” album, also seen and heard at the start of the 1991 Oliver Stone film, “The Doors”, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.
Thanks, Warren and saps … such irony !
I’m reminded of the Hitchcock film “Rear Window” (which may have been shown outdoors at the Grandview !) and of my father’s favorite joke :
“Oh, man ! I didn’t sleep a wink last night ! The shade was up all night !”
“Why didn’t you pull it down ?”
“It was up across the street !”
Yes, it’s the old cliche about half a loaf, in this case, as an aid to memory.
I may be wrong about the grand staircase dividing in two.
Yes, better that part of the Oasis survived as a CVS, rather than be completely demolished.
Thanks, Bway, for posting your recollections.
“The theater did deteriorate fast in between the movie era and the roller rink era, when it was the rock concert venue, the outside looked like hell in that time.”
Appropriate to apperances by Richard Hell and the Voidoids !
“ … and the beautiful old stained glass light fixtures were gone, just marks where they once were, in a sea of blackness.”
A sea of blackness … that’s quite a void !
This is what I remember of the interior of the RKO Madison Theater :
I remember the inner lobby as about six times as long (parallel to Madison Street) as it was wide (parallel to Wyckoff Avenue). The grand staircase up to the balcony was at the far end, close to the Wyckoff Avenue wall. The ceiling was very high, and from its center must have hung the grand chandelier. Either there, or over the forward half of the orchestra seats. There may have been a large mirror on the wall at the head of the grand staircase. The grand staircase may have had an intermediate landing, from which it divided in two (left and right) in completing its ascent to the balcony level, and the mirror may have hung on the wall of this landing. There were also mirrors behind the refreshment counter in the inner lobby. I remember seeing myself in one of them in January 1969 before getting seated to see “Dracula Has Risen From The Grave”.
I remember the balcony floor area (outside the seats) as extensive. I don’t have memories of walking around the balcony railing (marble balustrade ?) and looking down into the inner lobby, or of walking up that grand staircase. I DO remember, on Tuesday Sept. 6, 1966, while seeing “Die, Monster, Die !” there with my father, getting up from my balcony seat to go to the men’s room, and walking over tiled floors past old-fashioned underlit “pointing hand” signs for restrooms and telephones (in booths). The men’s room was long and narrow, the length at right angles to Myrtle Avenue, with a window onto Myrtle Avenue at its end, on the western side of the façade.
I remember the balcony seating area as roughly half the size of the orchestra seating area. I remember the ceiling over the rear orchestra seats, directly below the balcony seats, as decorated with ringed half-globes that, to me, looked like the planet Saturn embedded in the ceiling.
I saw similar ceiling decoration in the Corona Plaza Theater on Roosevelt Avenue at 103rd Street when I saw the Matthew Broderick – Jean Reno “Godzilla” there in late May 1998.
Looking forward to the Madison’s screen, I remember the “opera boxes” on the sides, and a small blue-white luminous clock on the wall, above and to the left of the screen.
Other than “Die, Monster, Die !” I remember sitting in the balcony for only two other films, “The Odd Couple” and “The Green Berets”, both summer 1968, the latter, August 2nd. I remember that date because I saw that movie then, instead of a Doors concert at the Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadow Park. I was probably better off with the movie, as I’ve read about that Doors concert turning into a near-riot. I probably sat in the balcony then so that the adult I was with (dad, mom) could smoke.
I remember the outer lobby as opulent, mirrored, with a tiled floor, covered with corrugated rubber runners, and of course with lobby cards on the walls, and maybe also with sandwich board signs for upcoming films scattered about the floor. Although the outer lobby seemed spacious, it probably only amounted to maybe one-ninth the total floor area of the theater.
I remember the inner lobby carpet as either dark maroon, with maybe an Oriental design, or dark maroon and green with a fern leaf design. I remember the inner lobby carpet gradually being obscured by shoe-blackened discarded chewing gum, just like a city sidewalk outside a candy store.
Progressing forward in time from the first film I remember seeing there, “Reptilicus”, in summer 1961, to the last, “Lipstick” in summer 1976, I remember less and less of the interior décor of the theater, perhaps because of its deterioration, and became increasingly focused on simply going in there, seeing my movie, then leaving.
I hope this all helps you recall more of your own experiences at the RKO Madison. I’d like to read more of your recollections, if you have any.