Loew's Valencia Theatre

Thanks, Ed Solero, for posting these detailed Jamaica memories of your youth. You’ve mentioned many interesting details of some rapidly changing conditions of your old home neighborhood.

Re : your former English teacher : I’m amazed that he also held on to his life, let alone his job as a teacher of impressionable youth ! May I ask what his personal problems were, and how did they, and the sleaze that he lived in, spill over to you and your classmates ?

SRO = Servicemen’s Relief Organization ? Was the hotel pre-WW I or II ?

June 1982. I lived in Laurelton and took the Q5 bus along Merrick Ave to Hillside Ave for 6 years ( including 3 yrs on my way to Ryan Junior High in Fresh Meadows via transfer to the Utopia Pkwy Q17A bus) from 1976 until 1982. I passed the opposing marquees of the RKO Alden and Loew’s Valencia Theatres just about every weekday during the school year. Saw the Valencia marquee changeover from movie theater to church. Observed the elevated J train tracks come down and recede into the distance to the west as it was dismantled from its terminus at Merrick Ave (I can recall the lower portions of the supporting stanchions remained along the curb of Jamaica Ave for several years before finally being ripped out). Passed by the Long Island Press sign (which remained in place on the facade of their former headquarters for years after the paper shut down). Watched as the Alden went from single screen to twin and then quartet.

As bustling a shopping district as Jamaica Avenue always was, that period was certainly of darker times for the area. I remember not to far from Jamaica Avenue there was an old pre-war SRO apartment building known as the Bristol Hotel. I remember driving by several times and the corner where it was located (somewhere along 89th Avenue, I believe) was busy with drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes and cars slowing down for the solicitation of one illicit service or another. Believe it or not, an English teacher that I had while at Jamaica High was taking up residence at the Bristol around this time! He was a troubled man with a littany of personal problems – and looking back, it’s amazing he was able to hold on to his job as a teacher of impressionable young teens! Oh the wonders of tenure – the Union is very strong in NYC!

The Gertz Dept. Store in Jamaica was, if I remember it correctly, sort of like a 2nd rate Macy’s yet still a very nice department store. I remember it well because my sister-in-law Regina Murphy worked there in the coffee shop in Gertz as a waitress in the late 60s/early 70s.
Does anyone remember the odd but very tasty chicken chow mein sandwiches on a hamburger bun you could get at the Woolworth’s counter in Jamaica?
I remember when I was a child, my grandmother taking me shopping with her and we would always eat lunch in a dept. store restaurant or coffee shop. It seemed so many stores had them back “in the day”. What a terrific convenience for shoppers!

The Gertz was to the west on Jamaica at New York Blvd, wasn’t it? That street is now known as Guy R. Brewer Blvd. Mays was another department store I remember in the area, further to the east on Jamaica Ave around 170th Street. Mays lasted at least into the early 1980’s when I graduated from Jamaica High School.

second-run

Good idea, Lost Memory ! Now it’s a power supply issue !

Ten billion gigawatts into the flux capacitor! Right from the third rail of the Jamaica el ! And right down that center track !

Lost Memory, that’s good to know about what Google will find for you.

>>saps, whose chest do you prefer, King Kong’s or Jayne Mansfield’s ? How about Fay Wray ?

They all have their good points.

Admission is free, but donation gladly accepted.
How did you cheat? Did you look it up somewhere?

Interesting, Warren, that it would have been fight FILMS, then, rather than closed-circuit TV coverage of the fight.

Thanks, Warren.

Which two films were Columbia releases ?

Rodan was released in 1956, “Vertigo” in 1958.

“Vertigo” would have been awesome at the Valencia !

No, Ed, I think you’re confusing it with “Five Million Years To Earth”, about the Martian spaceship found in the Hobbs End subway station in London, the third Quatermass film, the first two being “The Quatermass Experiment”, with Brian Donlevy in the title role and Richard Wordsworth as the hollow-eyed astronaut Victor Carune, who slowly and painfully degenerates into a blob of tentacle-waving goo that must be electrocuted near Westminster Abbey before it reproduces itself and consumes all life on Earth. The American release was titled “The Creeping Unknown”. The rarely seen second film was “Quatermass And The Pit”.

“20 Million Miles To Earth” was the Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer film about the giant T-Rex-like Ymir from Venus. The Kraken from the 1981 Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer film “Clash Of The Titans” was very similar to it.