Comments from flushingd

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flushingd
flushingd commented about UA Quartet on Feb 27, 2010 at 2:35 am

One thing that perplexed me about the Quartet was the never-used door in the front right of the theater, the inside of which was empty for years in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps it was too small to rent out? Towards the end, when they were in the process of closing up they finally rented it if I recall correctly.

I saw many movies here – Grease, Back to School, Commando, Flash Gordon (yaa, it played there, I saw it at the Quartet), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Peggy Sue Got Married, Time Rider and many more. I saw Commando with my grandmother, because she wanted to see who the actor was (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who had married into the Kennedy family. Me and a friend went to see Once Bitten but the projector broke five minutes into the movie and everyone got a refund.

I was too young to see R rated movies in the 1970s and 1980s but I do remember posters to thrillers and horror movies, such as the Dressed to Kill poster, a phrase which I did not understand at the young age I saw the poster, never mind the pun. That the Quartet used to show X rated movies is something I forgot, although I vaguely recall adults talking about this topic 35 years ago or so. I don’t know what’s more surprising in that old ad – that an X-rated movie was playing at the Quarter, or that a Swedish art film with Liv Ullmann was playing at the Quartet.

Does anyone remember the theater renovation done a few years before the Quartet closed? If I recall correctly, the upstairs and lobby had gotten a little bit dumpy by the mid/late 1980s, but was renovated a bit nicer at that time.

I remember Eddie in the Quartet, and pretty much every other store in Flushing and Bayside. I was, like so many other, yelled at by Rose.

I also remember Mike’s Comic Hut, Murrays, Bridies, Kam Ying, Happy Days Pizza, the Reception House, Scaturros, Jack in the Box and the diner. Didn’t the pet store have two entrances? One an aquarium and one a pet store. I remember seeing all the fire trucks when it burned down. Across from Mike’s, Bridies and Happy Days was the music store with the guitars, the shoe store and a florist.