Loews Cineplex Cinema 5

I was tooling around with the Windows Local Live satellite mapping site and found that the image for the old Cinema City 5 lot still shows the building to be in existence. The image is copyrighted 2005 and the al fresco mural that adorned the upper facade facing the LIE has already been painted over. However, cars are still seen in the shopping center’s parking lot, so at least one or two of the businesses there might still have been opened, even if the theater was not. Here’s the link to the image:

View link

The theater occupied the large trapezoidal structure at the left end of the shopping center. The view that opens up faces north and once can see the five small rectangular “marquees” that ran along the overhang that wraps around the entire shopping center. The mural was on the facade directly above this awning. This is actually the side of the theater where exit doors from the auditoriums were located. The entrance is around the corner to the left. You can rotate the view to look eastward (by using the directional tool in the palette to the left of the image) to view the side with the theater entrance.

The lobby was in the center of the building and was sunken by a few steps from street level. There was a large circular candy counter and the auditoriums were on the perimeter of the lobby at street level (so you had to climb a ramp or a few steps back up out of the sunken lobby to enter each room). I believe there were 3 or 4 auditoriums on the right side (with the screen walls facing the southern exposure seen in the above photo) with the remainin screen(s) toward the rear. I hated when this was the only local theater where a given movie was playing and after a while I just chose to travel to other parts of the borough (or into Nassau County) to catch a flick rather than suffer the low-rent quality of the presentations here.

This site is currently a huge hole in the ground and is completely fenced in. Again, I say “good riddance!”

This listing needs to be updated. The building has been completely leveled to the ground. I for one am not at all sad to see it gone as it may be the worst theater I’ve ever attended (Movieworld in Douglaston comes in a close 2nd). RCDTJ posted that almost every old theater becomes a church. This was not an old theater. This was a low-rent multiplex of no-frills shoe box theaters carved out of an existing retail space where presentation was routinely sub-standard. Good riddance. I wasn’t even a fan of the mural that faced Horace Harding. And the parking lot was a nightmare. The Fresh Meadows multiplex in the shell of the old Century’s Meadows Theater on the other side of the Long Island Expressway is a vastly superior facility.

The theatre is completely demolished. Please update the listing to show that. It will be a Korean Church and school.

It’s the end for this theater. Only a tiny gutted out section of the building is standing.

Almost every old theater I know becomes a church.

Half the building has been torn down. I wonder what happened to all the equipment.

The building is completely abandoned.They were supposed
to clean up an environmental problem, dont know if they ever did.

My above posting should have read “all the renovations Cineplex did on the inside”. It seems the whole building is abandoned not just the cinemas. Could be another high rise coop.

They mainly only played films that were geared to monorities and horror . they were bound to close

I remember seeing the movies CHUD and All Of Me here in 1984.
A very run of the mill theater with little ambiance.