The former Orient Theater (I remember it pretty well, I grew up on Ocean Avenue in the 1950s and my Grandmother lived in a cold-water railroad flat on Armstrong Avenue, between what was then Jackson Avenue and Ocean Avenue) is not actually the Our Lady of Sorrows Church building: that’s a few blocks away, on Clerk Street. On May 28, 1958 the Archbishop of Newark approved the purchase of the Orient Theatre on Ocean Avenue to be renovated as the parish auditorium. It is still used for weekly bingo games and social events. Frank and Nancy Sinatra were married at OLS on February 4, 1939. My grandmother and I used to wait for the Greenville-Lafayette bus at the corner of Ocean and Cleremont, across the street from the OLS auditorium after our Saturday visits to Woolworth’s on Jackson (now MLK Drive) and Cleremont.
They would pull that curtain up at the beginning of every movie and drop it again at the end. I used to marvel at its wrinkles after 60-odd years of multiple up-and-downs every day of the week.
The former Orient Theater (I remember it pretty well, I grew up on Ocean Avenue in the 1950s and my Grandmother lived in a cold-water railroad flat on Armstrong Avenue, between what was then Jackson Avenue and Ocean Avenue) is not actually the Our Lady of Sorrows Church building: that’s a few blocks away, on Clerk Street. On May 28, 1958 the Archbishop of Newark approved the purchase of the Orient Theatre on Ocean Avenue to be renovated as the parish auditorium. It is still used for weekly bingo games and social events. Frank and Nancy Sinatra were married at OLS on February 4, 1939. My grandmother and I used to wait for the Greenville-Lafayette bus at the corner of Ocean and Cleremont, across the street from the OLS auditorium after our Saturday visits to Woolworth’s on Jackson (now MLK Drive) and Cleremont.
They would pull that curtain up at the beginning of every movie and drop it again at the end. I used to marvel at its wrinkles after 60-odd years of multiple up-and-downs every day of the week.