Loew's Avenue B Theatre
72 Avenue B,
New York,
NY
10009
72 Avenue B,
New York,
NY
10009
5 people
favorited this theater
Loew’s Avenue B Theatre is part of one of the great rags-to-riches stories of showbiz history. Movie mogul Marcus Loew erected it on the very site of the tenement building where he was born. Needless to say, his birthplace was demolished to make way for the luxurious 1,750-seat theatre, which was designed by Thomas W. Lamb and first opened on January 8, 1913, with vaudeville as its main attraction and movies thrown in just as fillers.
The Avenue B Theatre was the top Loew’s house on the Lower East Side until the mid-1920’s, when the circuit took over the Commodore Theatre on Second Avenue, which was a much busier area for entertainment and shopping. The Avenue B Theatre was reduced to playing movies at the end of their Loew’s circuit run, and remained so until its closure around 1957-58.
I don’t know if anyone operated the theatre after that. It was eventually demolished and replaced by a nursing facility.
Contributed by
Warren G. Harris
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Recent comments (view all 14 comments)
I spent many saturdays 7 sundays in the early 50s in that wonderful place. My friends and I would go around the corner on 5th street that sold a big brown greasy bag of french fries for 15 cents and would stay watch a double feature, a action serial, and 25 cartoons.
I laugh now when I think of how many times my mother would come to get me and bring me home, boy would I get it. It was a simple white building, and still remember the lion heads that stood out of the wall.
Good story of how Marcus Loew built the theatre at the site of his birth.Good history.
From the 2005 post above:
Marcus Loew said “This is the most pretentious of the houses on our string, because my better judgment was over-balanced by my sentimentalism and my longing to do something better here than I ever did before.”
Up to the 1930’s “pretentious” meant “luxurious” and did not have the negative connotations assigned to the word today.
Too bad the photos do not work anymore.
Marcus Loew was born on this date in 1870.
The Avenue B had a large organ built by M. P. Moller, their opus 1947 with four manuals and 31 ranks. It is interesting that the organ records state “contained many used parts, $5,700.” You gotta laugh, Marcus Loew builds a spectacular new theatre on the site of his childhood home, but let’s see if we can’t save a few dollars on that organ, okay?
I also find reference that Wurlitzer sold a little 2-manual, 3-rank organ to “Avenue B Theatre, New York, NY” in 1926 (opus 1372). Was there another hall with the same name? Maybe this was a lobby organ? Another mystery!
The Loew’s theater was demolished to build the nonprofit Cabrini Nursing Home that served low-income elderly on the lower east side. A couple of years ago Cabrini was forced to close and sell, couldn’t even get a lease extension that would allow them to build on another site, and had to move some 100 patients to other facilities. The new owner has converted the building to luxury apartments, known as Bloom62.
It’s mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s first book, ‘The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’ (1966), in a piece called ‘Putting Daddy On’. He accompanies a friend named Parker (who seems to be an advertising executive) down to Avenue B to seek out Parker’s son, who has dropped out of Columbia:
“Here is Parker with his uptown clothes and his anointed jowls, walking past the old Avenue B cinema, a great rotting building with lions' heads and shattered lepers' windows…Here is this ripening. forty-six-year-old agency executive walking along amidst the melted store fronts…Everything is collapsing under New York moss, which is a combination of lint and soot.”
Uploaded a 1948 photo of the Avenue B which appears on the Wurlitzer site and a sketch of the façade courtesy of mcny.org.
I love the work of Thomas Lamb. I might be in a minority here but I believe that the guy never made a mistake. Without Thomas Lamb there would have been no Eugene DeLarosa. I know – bold statement. To me he is THE theatre architect. All though there is a similarity to others, this front, this taxpayer structure is my favorite theatre front that he ever did.