Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
54 Varick Street,
New York,
NY
10013
4 people
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If you scroll all the way down on that site, it says it is closed.
Looks like it in fact is still open:
http://www.tribecacinemas.com
My wedding reception was at the Screening Room. Best wedding ever! And sadly, the pastry chef who created one of their signature desserts, Lemon Caramel Icebox cake, died in 9/11. Her name was Heather Ho, and she was no longer at the Screening Room and was working at Windows on the World. However, they still had the dessert on the menu and it was transformed into a wedding cake for me. We went there after our honeymoon the first week of September 2001 (our wedding was Aug 19, 2001) to finalize our bill, and a week later 9/11 happened. So sad. They did close and then try to reopen about 6 months or a year later, but never recovered.
Closed last summer and soon to be demolished.
Exterior photos of Tribeca Cinemas taken June 2008 and February 2012.
True: they do festivals, private screenings, benefits, and cultural screenings for the Tribeca Film Institute. While some of these are open to the public, not all are, and they aren’t running a commercial art house in the sense that the Angelika is. They also do screenings during the Tribeca Film Festival. I had a film show in the Big Apple Film Festival last November at the theater.
This place is open and screening films weekly but apparently they are trying to keep it a secret, so don’t tell anyone.
http://www.tribecacinemas.com/TC_Home/
exterior shots taken nov 2007
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2007632345/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/2008455098/
Thanks LM, I now recognise this as THE SCREENING ROOM where I saw GOSFORD PARK. It had old beat-up uncomfortable seats with several missing and I felt like I was sitting in a 42nd Street dive. Although it was booked for specialised films the filthy concession stand sold pizza, of all things.
I never went back.
To further confuse matters there was another theatre that was called “Tribeca Cinema” at 41 White Street. There was a discussion of this theatre somewhere here, but the White Street Tribeca Cinema had a brief life as a revival theatre in the late summer of ‘92 to the late fall of '92/early winter '93. It literally opened/closed within a span of months. I remember going there to see a number of screenings and it was a real bare bones operation. I never could remember the name of the cinema until I stumbled across it doing some research yesterday. I remember learning it closed when I went down there to catch Fellini’s “Roma” and the theatre was dark. I think I later went up to Columbus Circle to catch “A River Runs Through It” on its first run since I had time to kill.
I had been here a couple of times in the late 1990s to see foreign or independent films. Nice cozy set up and good snack counter, along the lines of the Film Forum. Since I’m rarely down by Canal Street, not sure what it’s doing right now outside of the Tribeca Film festival.
This is all well and nice but did this cinema ever open?
That makes sense, but you would think the Regal folks would welcome the Tribeca Film Festival with open arms becaue I can’t imagine that that ‘plex does much business. The only time I’ve ever been there is for the fest.
And one benefit for expanding the fest is that they seem to have added screenings for the films that are playing in the fest. Many of the screenings sell out. Since I’m not an insider, I don’t buy a festival pass, I don’t live “downtown” and I don’t have an American Express Card, I don’t get first dibs on tickets. All those groups get ducats first, then the tickets go on sale to the John Q. Public. I buy mine the day tickets go on sale and even then I’ve found myself shut out of screenings. Hopefully, the expansion of the fest will eliminate this.
Someone told me recently that they had a problem with the Regal Theatre complex down there. So that one of the reasons for the move.
I have been attending films since the beginning (all the way back to ‘02) and am a little baffled by this change as well. You won’t get the sense of a festival if the venues are that stretched out and it defeats the festival’s original intent to bring people downtown. The only time I go below Canal each year is for this fest. Maybe they didn’t want to rent the projection equipment they had to bring to Stuyvesant High School and I assume Pace University’s theatre. I don’t even know if those venues are being used this year.
It apears this theater will be the center of the Tribecca Film Festival which is oddly moving up town this year to play at locations as far North as Lincoln Square (which angers me to no end that movies in the festival will play so far from Tribecca since the original goal of the festival was to bring revenue in to lower Manhatten and areas directly impacted by 9/11). I guess all of Manhatten has, granted, but the new locations at AMC/Loews make it hard to catch multiple screenings, last year the furthest up they went was a screening or two at the Prada store in So Ho.
The Tribeca Cinemas will be hosting a Q&A meeting tonight (Feb. 27th, 7-8 p.m.) for those interested in volunteering at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
Location: 54 Varick Street at Laight Street
Transit directions: Take the #1, #9, A, C or E subway trains to Canal Street.
Festival department heads as well as the Volunteer Manager will be on hand to give a preview of what it’s like to work at the Festival and to answer questions.
You can fill in an application on the spot for a place on the volunteer team.
The cinemas’ official website is: http://tribecacinemas.com
The festival’s official website is: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org
Two other notes:
– John Vanco, hired several months ago as General Manager of the new IFC Center, booked the Screening Room for several years during the late 1990s and up until 2001 or thereabouts, programming during that time many productions of his now-defunct Cowboy Pictures.
The Screening Room opened sometime around ‘96 and closed in the fall of 2002, never fully recovering from the effects of 9/11. The impression I have is that the Tribeca Cinemas are operating as more of a private/special event venue and will not be booked and operated as a more traditional movie theatre would be; Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal have been and/or are probably able to recoup their costs as is.
My, bad.
The Screening Room closed in 2003 or 2004. It wasn’t even open in ‘93 and '94.
While I am here and writing about downtown, isn’t there a cinema or at least a cinema building in the South Street Seaport. I don’t know what it is being used for, if anything. I think it may have been used as a revival house for about a minute in the 80s or 90s because I think I vaguely remember “Gone With the Wind” screening here (I didn’t go). I also could be hallucinating.
The Screening Room closed in the last 2 years or so. What he meant to say was that the Screening Room closed in 2003 or 2004, following 9/11…
Something’s not right here — if it was impacted by 9/11 it would not have closed in 1993 or 1994.