Triangle Theatre
2000 Commerce Street,
Yorktown Heights,
NY
10598
2000 Commerce Street,
Yorktown Heights,
NY
10598
1 person
favorited this theater
Additional Info
Previously operated by: Lesser Theatre Services
Architects: Drew Eberson
Previous Names: Triangle Theatre
Nearby Theaters
Located in the Triangle Shopping Center. The Triangle Theatre was opened on June 25, 1965 with Burt Lancaster in “The Train”. It was twinned in 1980 and was closed on August 10, 1989 with Danny Aiello in “Do the Right Thing” & Walt Disney’s animated feature “Peter Pan” on Screen 1 and Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” on Screen 2.
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
Given the location in the Triangle Shopping Center, the Triangle Theatre might have been one of the shopping center houses developed by Ron Lesser Enterprises in the 1960s.
The guide to the John and Drew Eberson papers at the Wolfsonian Institute lists a Yorktown Heights Theatre for a client named Lesser as a 1965 design by Drew Eberson. If there were no other theaters built in Yorktown Heights around that time, it must have been the Triangle that was listed.
I vaguely remember this theater, but I had to submit it, because my father used to take me here to see movies when I was very young. We continued to go to the theatre by the Beach Shopping Center (on Dayton Lane) after it closed. I do remember that it was where the CVS Pharmacy is today, either that whole row of shops or most of them.
To Joe Vogel: Lesser was a booking agent for the independant theater owners in the NYC area. They don’t own any theaters .
I got the name Ron Lesser Enterprises from the description of the CT page for the Beach Theatre in Peekskill. The caption of this photo of the Beach in Boxoffice, January 15, 1968, just says it was opened by Lesser Enterprises.
In any case, it’s possible that the Ronnie Lesser who was associated with Howard Lesser and Edmund Linder in the Lesser Enterprises theater chain in the 1960s (see the Boxoffice item linked in the earlier comment by Tinseltoes) was not the same Ron Lesser who, in 1974, founded the booking agency Lesser Theatre Services, but there is plenty of documentation that someone named Ron Lesser was developing and operating theaters in the state of New York in the 1960s, and the Triangle was one of his houses.
I think it’s likely that Ron the operator and Ron the booker were one and the same, though. Had Ron Lesser the booker never been a theater operator it seems unlikely that he would have become President of the Independent Theater Owners Association (ITOA) or served on the Board of Directors for National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO), as noted in his brief biography on the web site of Andromeda Studios.
I’m not sure what the relationship between Howard and Ron Lesser was. They might have been father and son or they might have been brothers. A Howard Lesser was operating theaters around New York in partnership with Louis Kessler at least as early as 1928, but there could have been a Howard Lesser Jr. as well, and of course the operator from the 1920s might have been an entirely different Howard Lesser. Lesser is not that uncommon a name, especially in the movie business.
This one opened on June 25, 1965. The opening movie was “The Train” with Burt Lancaster.
The Triangle Theatre was twinned in 1980 and was renamed “Triangle Twin”. The Triangle Twin closed for the final time on August 10, 1989 with “Do The Right Thing” and the reissue of Walt Disney’s “Peter Pan” at Screen 1 and “Dead Poe Society” at Screen 2.