Century's Prospect Theatre
41-10 Main Street,
Flushing,
NY
11355
41-10 Main Street,
Flushing,
NY
11355
9 people
favorited this theater
Showing 26 - 50 of 100 comments
Sometime after the Propect returned to the Century Circuit it was twinned. However, both auditoriums opened at different times. The
ads ready “Twins, one at a time.” And then, subsequently there was another divide and then … …The Oceana, Tuxedo and Sheepshead reverted to Century at the same time as the Prospect, also the Plaza in Queens, I believe.
Eureka! That’s it, thank you all so much! It’s so hard to tell from most of the photos but there was one photo in particular posted by Ken Roe that has the elevated train steps coming down to the street near the theater. Exactly the shot in the movie.
Thanks Fred. I don’t see a Prospect Theater listed for the Bronx on this site. Was there one near an elevated train there that’s not here? In one of the pictures of this Flushing theater it does say that the elevated LIRR was a block away – maybe it’s that staircase?
The 7 train goes underground at Main St. .The theater you talking abot is in Brooklen or the bronx
Does anyone know if this Prospect Theater is the same one seen briefly (once at night, once in daylight) in the 1982 Italian slasher film NEW YORK RIPPER? By pausing the frame and looking at any pictures found here it doesn’t really look the same, but it definitely says PROSPECT on the marquee in the film and doesn’t look like the other PROSPECT in Brooklyn. Also, in the film it looks like there was a store across the street from the theater called LONDON HATS. And there’s a long, elevated train staircase at the end of the block – the 7 train?
From bobosan’s post on Dec. 13th. 2008, The movie playing at the Prospect was MGM’s “Wife vs. Secretary” (1936).
Warren G Harris are you out there? In a much earlier posting you said Century orginially traded the Prospect for the Avalon and Manor in Brooklyn. The name Avalon was retained. What did the Manor become since none is listed as such?
And then Loews tried to buy out the Century chain. The theatre chains are like banks with the buys, sells and name changes.
Thanks, bobosan. Horrible how that Wendy’s nearby was shot up in the year 2000. I ate there quite frequently in 1999.
Oops, wrong link:
View link
Here’s a 1936 photo of the Prospect that I found:
View link
The link I posted on 9/25/07 no longer works; use this instead:
Side wall of the Prospect in 1971
Here’s a shot of the Bliss sidewall to illustrate Warren’s point. Not exactly the same when viewed side by side, but they do share that motif of lighter colored brick accents along the wall. I want to say there is a somewhat similar motif on the sidewall of the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan, but I might be mistaken.
The Wyckoff Theater, at the eastern corner of Wyckoff Avenue and Bleecker Street in …. Bushwick ? Wyckoff Heights ? Ridgewood ? … Brooklyn, postal zone 11237, became a Jehovah’s Witnesses hall, before I had a chance to know it as a movie theater. My oldest aunt remembers it as a movie theater, however.
Yeah, saps, I’ll bet.
I kinda liked ALL the nudity in that sexually-charged movie.
Slightly skewed nude teenage girls on that still-huge screen ! Hubba hubba !
It was in the right side of the divided autditorium, but still a pretty big screen, even though the seats faced slightly to the left!
“Porky’s” at RKO Keith’s Flushing ? All those nude teenage girls on that huge screen ? Hubba hubba !
I saw some movies here around 1980 when I lived in Flushing; it was already a triplex then, and I remember a summer matinee show wherein the theater was icy cold and nearly emnpty. I was sorry to see it demolished some time later.
I also saw the ad and read the comments about Porky’s, which I saw at the Keith’s — it previewed at Prospect but opened at Keith’s?
Great picture, mp775. Thanks. It feels like I’ve got those early 1960’s GM Fishbowl buses in my DNA !
The side wall of the Prospect can be seen in this 1971 photo of a B58 bus on 41st Road.
I think I saw “Altered States” with William Hurt here in 1980.
Thanks, Warren. These details are helpful and interesting.
I saw quite a few movies here. Superman (78), Tootsie, Ghostbusters, Police Academy, Sharon Stone’s god-aweful debut, a low budget horror film Deadly Blessing just to name a few. I loved this place. It was a far cry from the Keith’s, but a lot of good memories. I was working in Flushing in the late 90’s up until 2003 for Verizon. I worked on Main Street pretty often. Because the block the Prospect was on was so radically changed, I couldn’t place the exact location of where the theater used to stand. That’s how diffent the block accross the street from the Public Library had become. Everything on that block was converted into various Asian shops. One day I had a job on that block and when I went into the basement of the buisiness I was working in I found stacks of the old metal theater chairs from the Prospect. I wasn’t sure what they were there for. I had thought the building had been demolished so I would have figured all of that stuff would have been dumped. Not an exciting find, but I knew then I was in the former site of the theater. There wasn’t a single thing in the building that would have tipped me off that was where I was. Had I not seen the chairs, I never would have known. Talk about erasing the past. That is what Tommy Huang would have loved to have done to the Keiths. Bastard.
If anyone has any pictures of the theater from the 70s-80s, inside or out, please post them. As hard as it is to find pictures of the Keiths from this period, they seem almost non-existant for the Prospect. Where the hell were all of our cameras back then. God if we only knew then what we know now.
Warren thanks for the 1970 pic, that brought back a lot of memories of how the place looked.