Comments from PKoch

Panzer65, please keep posting here. No, I’ve never viewed a motion picture from an “opera box”, though, like yourself, as a kid, I looked at them within the Ridgewood and Madison, and wondered about them as much as you did.

For history, perhaps Warren could help.

For details of building construction within the Glenwood, perhaps Bway could help. He’s been great that way about what’s left inside what was once the RKO Madison.

Thanks, MikeK. I’ve noticed the “Eat my meat” and “I’ll pork ya !” but not the “welcome home Timmy”. I remember posting about the first two phrases some time ago, if not on the Oasis Theater page, then on the page for some other Ridgewood theater.

Thanks for posting your Oasis movie memories, Panzer65. When I got back home to Ridgewood from my summer 1978 job in western Pennsylvania, I noticed the posters on light poles and traffic lights for a concert by Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and the Dead Boys, Saturday, August 12, 1978, at the Forest Park music grove and bandshell. I didn’t go, as I had returned two weeks later.

The one and only film I saw at the Oasis was “For The Love Of Benji”, the first or second Saturday in January, 1976.

No, oodygdin, I don’t know anything about this theater, on Wyckoff, at either Weirfield or Centre St. I would like to know more about your Putnam trolley rides. I assume you mean the No. 26 trolley, the predecessor of the B-26 bus between Ridgewood and downtown Brooklyn, which runs on Halsey Street between either Bedford and Nostrand Avenue in Bed-Stuy, and Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood.

Are you sure you don’t mean the Alhambra Theater, which used to be at the eastern corner of Halsey Street and Knickerbocker Avenue ? The 26 trolley would have gone past it. There IS a page for this theater on this site. I don’t recall the number offhand right now.

So the Pitkin Theatre was once “the prince of Pitkin Avenue” ? Great !

Or perhaps the Throop Theater was located on a cross street in Bed-Stuy near Throop Avenue. I don’t know.

Thanks for posting the link to the ad for the Trylon, Warren.

Ed Solero, I remember the old phone exchanges very well, including HA for Elmhurst (prep school classmate of mine). Thanks for mentioning what it stood for.

Also AP for APplegate (Cypress Hills, Bklyn), GL for GLenmore (my old home Ridgewood exchange) HY for HYacinth, EV for Evergreen, and VI for VIctoria (Richmond Hill, VA for Virginia ?

I’ve also seen HA for a home in Bayside.

Thank you all for your input. I have heard that now, multiplex cinemas have to compete with, and may already be in danger from, home computer game, and home theater entertainment, systems.

Yet, with a block-buster film, like “Spiderman III” nowadays, the multiplexes tend to return to the state of the single-screen theater, showing the same film on 3 or 4 screens. In that case, almost half of the screens and seats in the multiplex can be occupied by one film, yet with several times more screenings per day, and evening, of said film, than was possible with the older single-screen theater.

You’re probably right, Bway, and thanks for all the details, but I wanted to bring the idea up anyway, partly because I’d never seen it discussed here, and partly to get back on topic.

Thanks also for your rebuttal of the “strange notion” that Ridgewood “went bad”, and is no longer a viable community.

I think Ridgewood and Bushwick still are viable neighborhoods, with help having been on the way in the form of the gentrification of Bushwick over the past five or so years, and I am thinking also of the scarcity of movie theaters for about five miles in every direction from the Ridgewood and Madison, with the sole exception of the Atlas Park Multiplex two miles to the east northeast, which, however, seems much too upscale and too far away from the Ridgewood Theatre (and the Madison, were it to re-open as a cinema) to draw much business away from it, anyway.

I certainly hope the Ridgewood Theater does not close, given its history, and the fact that it observed, only five months ago, albeit quietly, its 90th anniversary as a functioning cinema.

What about the recent revival and success of the Loew’s Jersey City, as well as the Paradise, in the Bronx ?

mikemovies, let your freak flag fly while doing so !

Have you posted it there yet ?

If the quote fits ….