Beekman Theatre
1271 2nd Avenue,
New York,
NY
10065
1271 2nd Avenue,
New York,
NY
10065
14 people
favorited this theater
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I rarely go to this theatre. Most recently I caught Mike Hodges' “I’ll Sleep When I’m dead” last June and James Cox' “Wonderland” back in October of ‘03 when the Crown Cinemas was the last playing it played before heading off to video, or DVD, land.
I agree that this theatre is weird in that the box office is separated from the theatre entrance. It is a weird design because your instinct is to walk toward the theatre and not to the box office, which is tucked away off to one side.
I always wondered why the Upper East Side couldn’t support an art-house like the Lincoln Plaza on the West Side or the Angelika and now Sunshine Theatres downtown. I never go to the Upper East Side and transportation is a problem as only one subway line serves that area. In fact, the multi-plex boom bypassed the Upper East Side altogether.
Possibly another east side house house bites the dust…
The above should read – “Arrangements are being made to remove…”
– hey, it’s late and I’m tired.
I’m hearing through the grapevine that the New York twin will close by the end of this month. Arrangements are being to remove some of the equipment from the booth, which leads me to believe that the space will no longer be a theatre. However, another scenario that I heard has Clearview relocating here after the Beekman closes. Knowing that landlord, it wouldn’t surprise me if Crown was on a month-to-month agreement for the space, and had a falling out with the beloved Mr. S, who probably invited them to get the hell out.
i worked here and at the loews tower east as an assistant manager (not at the same time) from 1991 till 1996. from a working-there point of view, it seemed like you had to go up and down a lot of staircases to get from the box office to the mngrs office or to get from the managers office to anywhere. it was hard to get customers to go into the correct glass lobby out of the 2 lobbies, separated by a wall, since the customers wouldn’t see the little 2-foot marquees near the ceiling that showed which lobby for which film and the doorman would spend a lot of time pounding on the glass wall separating them for the patrons to come back up several steps of stairs, exit the building, and come back through the lobby that actually led to the right film. on the night they closed in 2002, i happened to be watching gosford park there (wasn’t working for loews anymore) and i was told that the manager had only been notified that very day that the thtr would close that day.
one interesting thing about working at a theater in manhattan, even though it wasn’t a partcularly luxurious theater, since it was/is pretty well located and was a first run house, you would definitely see celebrities not too infrequently on an opening weekend as you would be working there for a lot of that weekend. i think a hyped new movie is a somewhat-rare common denominator that draws both regular people and celebrities. i saw and took the liberty of saying hello to douglas fairbanks jr, anthony quinn, marcello mastroianni, hugh grant and elizabeth hurley, harold prince, e.l. doctorow, michael keaton, and i’m sure others.
I saw “Mean Girls” there most recently. The theatre, when it was a Loews, was often used for preview screenings.
The Crown New York Twin has also showcased a fair amount of Disney/Touchstone product in recent months, including ‘Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen’ and ‘Raising Helen’. (Continuing in that vein, Disney’s ‘The Incredibles’ is scheduled to open there this upcoming Friday, the 5th.)
As a Crown house, the New York Twin is still booked as a combo art house/general release house, the former consisting mostly of obscure releases and the latter generally being Paramount and Miramax product, along with a notable share of move-overs from other Midtown East sites. (For the record, after the New York Twin closed as a Loews venue in May of 2002, wrapping up with extended runs of ‘Changing Lanes’ and ‘Gosford Park’, it reopened on October 11, 2002 with ‘Below’ and ‘Knockaround Guys’.)
I think this cinema opened in early 1979 with ‘Norma Rae’, and it played ‘ET’ in 1982.
This is another basement cinema, built in about 1978 in a 47 story apartment building designed by Gruzan & Partners. This is a true twin theatre, where the two 400+ seat auditoriums and seperate lobbies and entry vestibules are mirror-images of each other. The box office and entrance are set in a low plaza a dozen steps down from the sidewalk. Going inside, you then went down aanother floor on steps to the lobby, and from the lobby down yet another 8 steps to the auditorium. There was an escalator to come back up to the entrance. Instead of a marquee, there is a pylon sign in the middle of the plaza steps that said ‘Loews New York One Two’. New Yorkers are used to finding theatres with a marquee, and we were always getting calls from people on the corner of 65th St. and 2nd Ave. who could not find the place. As with most theatres of the era the auditoriums are unremarkable, with dark carpet on the walls and low black ceilings. The seperate lobbies, while good for preventing cross-overs, are inadequate for holding a crowd. Loews booked it with a mix of arthouse and general release product. Loews operated it from the beginning until the lease ran out in 2002. For the past couple of years Crown has been running it.
This is one of the few Manhattan theatres that I have never been inside of.