Cinema Village
22 E. 12th Street,
New York,
NY
10003
22 E. 12th Street,
New York,
NY
10003
31 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 50 of 104 comments
Hello- as always i thank my fellow posters for replying to my inquiries. so Al A. if i understand you reply correctly the 55th St. Playhouse went from being a top art house to a gay porn house in short order? i suppose anything is possible in the big wide world of Manhattan real estate even the fall of 1971. its just i can’t picture the theater going from being a top art house than say two or weeks later becoming the top hard-core gay porn house in Manhattan. i naturally assumed there had to have been a significant closed up period.
Bigjoe, the SOBO only operated in 1971 and I believe some of the shows were live/film combo nude performance art pieces that would not be considered porn today.
The 55th St Playhouse descent into hard core porn was gradual but there was no closing period. After “THE BOYS IN THE SAND” there was a fine line between gay art films and gay sex films.
Hello Again To Ed S.– i figured considering the building’s locale the original firehouse would have
been build around 1890. so i wasn’t to far off.
two new notes. 1.i guess my memory is only 99% perfect. this theater’s sister theater on 3rd Ave. was for many years the Bijou one of the leading gay porn houses in the city. i was quite familar with the Bijou. yet a stone’s throw away on 11th St. the Evergreen for a few years was known as the Sobo a leading gay porn house. now i was in college during the period the Evergreen operated as the Sobo and was frequently in the Union Square Easy Village area yet never remember the Evergreen as the Sobo. even if it was a leading gay porn house it had to have been so
for a short period. plus i’m guessing there was no marquee to speak of which could be why i didn’t take note of its gay porn period.
2.a question about the 55th St. Playhouse i ask you here since that theater’s page hasn’t been updated in a while. the theater opened in the early 30s and for almost 40 years was a leading venue for foreign and independent films. now it started its almost 20 year career as one of Manhattan’s top gay porn houses when Wakefield Poole’s BOYS IN THE SAND opened i believe the first week of Dec. 1971 and therein lies my question. i doubt one week it was a top art house for foreign and independent film than the next week it switches to gay porn. therefore i’m guessing it must have been vacant, un-used whichever the correct term is for a certain period of time before it became a top gay porn house. am i
correct?
Good question. A cursory review of NYC records doesn’t reveal much. The oldest viewable document online is a temporary C of O issued in October of 1964, not too long after the building was converted into a cinema. A list of prior actions on the property show a variety of building notices that reach all the way back to some “unsafe building” notices in 1905 and 1909. There’s another notice dated in 1915 and then activity picks up once again in the late 1920’s and throughout the following decades. But nothing prior to the 1964 C of O’s is viewable, so its impossible to know what those documents might reveal.
Assuming the comments near the “top” of this listing are correct that the cinema was previously a turn-of-the-century firehouse, it’s interesting that it would have been labeled as unsafe as early as 1905! Of course, one must keep in mind that the NYC DOB records from that period are very sketchy, and it is not uncommon to find documents filed under the wrong property binder.
Hello To Ed S.–
i always remember this building being
the Cinema Village and assumed it was built
as such. but i read somewhere else that the
building was originally a firehouse which is
not mentioned in the intro. so obviously they
did a gut renovation of the original
structure. the question is- how old is the
basic structure?
Most of my knowledge comes from nearly 8 years trolling this site and doing research for some of the theaters I added here. I actually did add the listing for the Eros 2, another of Chelly Wilson’s porn houses that later became known as the Venus. I don’t recall ever seeing a mention of a Denise at the Gaiety while I was looking at old articles to dig up info on the Eros 2, but that research was completed a few years back, so I might have run across something and just forgot it!
I never frequented any porn houses (gay or otherwise), but I was a steady patron of the big theaters along Broadway and the grind houses on 42nd Street for a number of years in the late ‘70’s into the early '80’s, and have always held a fascination for the area as it was in those days.
Anyway, all of Chelly’s theaters are listed on CT and any thing of note that I might have learned would surely be posted on those pages:
Adonis
Cameo
Capri
Eros
Eros 2
Hello To Ed S.–
you seem quite knowledge so i have a question for you. during the good old days of gay porn two of the top gay theaters in midtown were the Eros(8th. Ave.&46 St) and the Adonis(51 St.&8th Ave.) they were both owned by a woman named Chelly Wilson(hopefully i spelled her first name right) would you happen to know she was either related to or was friends with Denise the nice lady who owned and operated the Gaiety on 46 St. they were both Greek so i figure it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Sharp eye, bigjoe59! Yes, that ad belongs to the Cinema Village annex that was in the former Bijou Theatre, located several blocks away on Third Avenue between East 12th and 13th Streets.
Hello- the ad in the intro is not for this theater was a sister theater on 3rd Avenue. in fact previous to being taken over by the Cinema Village the 3rd Avenue theater was for a time one of the top gay porn houses in the city.
I hate asking questions on this site instead of contributing but I was hoping someone could shed some light on what the set-up was as a single screen venue? It’s currently has a lobby with box office/concession on street level, theater #1 up a half-flight of stairs, theater #2 up a full-flight of stairs (with “stadium seating”) and theater #3 along with the bathrooms downstairs.
I do like this theater but worry about it and the Quad (which was showing second-run Oscar bait that was at the multiplex this fall), but they do a great job for the NYU crowd, and keep their prices even lower than some suburban multiplexes (they’ve always had a student rate).
Seems like a common problem when older theaters are quickly and cheaply carved up into multiple screens. Exact problem exists for the Fresh Meadows Theater in Queens and the Fantasy Theater in Rockville Centre, Long Island. If you have to slip out from one of the upstairs cinemas to use the facilities in the middle of a flick, you need to do a sprint down to the lowest level (and back again) in each of those locations. I would always get back to my seat completely winded!
while this theater has been in the forefront of showing indie
films for almost 50 years they screwed up royally when they
did a modernizing/tri-plexing in 1999. the only rest room is
in the lower level and is simply to damn small for three
screens. for instance the men’s room has only one stall so
you’re stuck if there’s a long line. i should think when they
“renovated” the theater they should have said “hey we need a
larger men’s rest room”. this has got to be the smallest men's
room in any movie theater in NYC.
Re-launch ad;
View link
“The Cinema Village opened on October 5, 1964 with Ingmar Bergman’s "All These Women”, not 1963 as previously stated."
I must correct this previous post I made as I have found some ads with a Village theatre playing subrun that pre-date October 1964 and must have been this theatre. The October date was most likely the introduction of a first-run arthouse policy
I saw John Woo’s “BOILING POINT” there, I noticed a small guy walking down the asile, he turned and looked at me, it was Spike Lee.
That should be How to lose a guy in 10 days!!
This theatre can be seen in the movie,“How to loose a guy in 10 days”
It is a nice marquee Woody.
two exterior shots taken in 2005
close up of the terrific marquee
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/73320718
exterior daytime
http://www.flickr.com/photos/woody1969/73320717
This theatre deserves a richer intro when you consider the history it has created and the contributions above…
Love this theater. I remember in the 70’s they had $1.99 bargain matinees. I saw Warhol’s Frankenstein and Dracula that way. I was 18 and thought I was so totally hip seeing Warhol films in the village, lol. And of course the countless times I saw midnight screenings of Pink Flamingos.
Renewing link.
i found it. Thanks anyway
but do you know their names?
does anyone know who the current owners of Cinema Village are?