Are you thinking of the Beachcliff, on Detroit Rd.?
Click on the blue ‘dave-bronx’ at the bottom of this post and it will take you to the page with my email – i’d rather not have it appear in the theatre comments – thanks –
Pres, if you want, I would be happy to post them on my photobucket page and post a link to them here. I have links on this site for pictures of the Playhouse Square theatres. The add-a-photo feature on this site hasn’t worked in ages….
For those not registered for the New York Times online, I’ll paste in the article referred to above by ‘Tonino:
October 22, 2005
In Nearly All Its Grandeur, Paradise Reopens in Bronx
By JOSEPH BERGER
Stars will not be twinkling in an enchanted nighttime sky, and goldfish will not be gliding through the fountain, but otherwise Paradise – or at least the Bronx version of it – is about to be regained.
The Loew’s Paradise, a 76-year-old movie palace that gave generations of working-class strivers a taste of Old World opulence and gave generations of teenagers a haunting setting for the taste of their first kiss, is scheduled to reopen next Saturday after more than 30 years of either being boarded up or sliced up into multiple screens.
The new owner of what was once the Bronx equivalent of Radio City Music Hall has restored much of its Italian baroque grandeur. Since putting up $4.5 million to acquire the theater two years ago, the owner, Gerald Lieblich, has gotten workers to clean the cherubs, caryatids, recumbent lions, gargoyles and other statuary in the vaulted lobby and gargantuan auditorium, install almost 4,000 burgundy seats and repaint the famed midnight-blue ceiling.
Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, called the reopening “the resurrection of one of the most spectacular movie palaces ever built.”
“It was the showplace of the Bronx,” he said. “It was meant to take people out of their humdrum existence and bring them into a world of unimagined wealth and luxury.”
The Paradise will not reopen as a movie house, however. Its opening night performance is a salsa and merengue concert, clearly a bid to cater to a borough where Latinos now make up half the populace. The entrepreneurs leasing the space also plan to hold gospel, rhythm and blues and comedy acts, live boxing matches, closed-circuit sports events, beauty pageants and nostalgia acts that might appeal to onetime Bronx residents.
The entrepreneurs also plan to use the giant auditorium once more for high school graduations, and to rent out the ornate lobby and mezzanine for weddings and bar mitzvahs, perhaps even for the grandchildren of those who remember first seeing “Singin' in the Rain” or “Jailhouse Rock” at the Paradise.
However the theater is used, the reopening of the 45,000-square-foot building is another milestone in the gathering renaissance of a borough that two decades ago was known for its landscape of eviscerated buildings and Fort Apache air of menace. Indeed, the once-princely boulevard it sits on, the 99-year-old Grand Concourse, is itself being spruced up. The refurbished Loew’s Paradise is likely to dazzle a different generation of strivers and their children just as it dazzled one resident, Diane Levine Edelstein, when she was a teenager almost a half-century ago.
“You walked in and you felt you were in another world, you weren’t in a movie theater,” said Ms. Edelstein, now a senior research assistant at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We always sat in the balcony because you felt closer to heaven. I remember watching the stars and not looking at the movie.”
Others remembered its balcony as something of a lovers' lane. “I remember going to the Paradise in the late 1950’s when they were showing ‘The Ten Commandments,’ and the couple to my right was breaking nine of them,” said Stephen M. Samtur, co-publisher of Back in the Bronx magazine, a nostalgic quarterly.
Phyllis Gross Greenbaum, now a publisher of community newspapers in the Washington-Baltimore area, suggested that the Paradise stunned her and her friends because “I don’t think many of us grew up with that kind of elegance.”
The Paradise, whose five-story facade has been declared a city landmark, opened in 1929, six weeks before the stock market crashed, with a showing of the “all-talking” film, “The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu,” starring Warner Oland. Its architect was John Eberson, an Austrian immigrant who began his career designing opera houses and went on to create dozens of what were known as “atmospheric” theaters, including five “Wonder Theaters” for the Loew’s national chain in the New York area.
The Paradise’s atmospheric show included twinkling stars, rolling clouds and flying pigeons. The stage was surrounded by sculptured walls with flowing vines, cypress trees and shrubs and classical statues everywhere. In three domes set into the lobby’s filigreed ceiling, Eberson had painters execute dreamy murals of ersatz half-nude deities: Sound, Story and Film.
The grand lobby was surrounded by fluted and gilded mahogany pillars and, at mezzanine level, an arched balustrade of royal proportions. On the lobby’s north wall Eberson placed a Carrara marble fountain of a child on a dolphin. (The fountain’s pool, which once held the goldfish, will not be replaced because it would interfere with a new concessions stand.) For the cream-toned terra cotta and marble facade, Eberson designed a mechanical clock topped by St. George astride a charger slaying a fire-breathing dragon every time the clock struck the hour. The theater cost $4 million to build.
Over the years, the fountain stopped bubbling, the clock stopped working and St. George vanished around 1970, somehow lowered five stories onto a busy thoroughfare. As television made it difficult to fill the theater’s seats and middle-class audiences moved to the suburbs, the Paradise was divided up, first as a twin around 1973 and then in the early 1980’s as a quadriplex, which it remained until 1994, when, severely run-down, it closed for good.
At least one effort to resurrect it collapsed, with $1 million alone spent on gilding. But in 2003, the Paradise was taken over by Mr. Lieblich, a 44-year-old developer of small commercial buildings.
“For the last 20 years that I’ve been in the Bronx, it’s been better and better, and in the theater I saw an eyesore that needed to be brought back as the crown jewel,” Mr. Lieblich said.
With workmen still vacuuming the auditorium, Mr. Lieblich showed a reporter around, highlighting the new air-conditioning, the repointing of the facade, the replacement of reddish neons in the marquee and the replication of the original oval ticket booth. Getting the lights to twinkle again, he said, proved uneconomical. He declined to say how much he had spent.
One of the keys to making the project profitable, he said, is renting the 30,000 square feet of commercial space that is part of the theater building to a significant retailer. One has not been secured yet. A major retailer would be a step up from the shops flanking the theater to the north, a 99-cents store and one that sells furniture on credit.
The opening-night concert is an only-in-New York production. The impresarios leasing the theater are Gabriel Boter, 58, who immigrated from the former Soviet state of Georgia in 1979, and his son Richard, 30, a nonpracticing lawyer who is married to a Dominican and is fluent in Spanish. Father and son expect to schedule 35 concerts a year and 10 boxing matches, though they do not have any longtime experience in organizing events.
There are three firm bookings after opening night, including a concert sponsored by WQHT-FM 97.1 “Hot 97” and a Latina beauty contest.
“There is a strong personal attachment I found people have to the Paradise,” the younger Mr. Boter said. “That gives me a strong sense of personal responsibility to make sure that it will have the splendor and be the jewel it once was.”
I’m looking at the marquee photos here (http://www.archboston.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=100&start=15), and what doesn’t look right about it is that they are using reverse zip-change letters (clear letters – blk bkgrnd) and all the areas where the white plastic is exposed without a letter should be covered by black spacers. With those type of letters the only white on the marquee should be the lettering.
It is the one from the late-90s, after Sony but before the Cineplex merger – with the current red and white kleiglight logo. It isn’t what I would call a “policy” trailer, it is just that little song, no “no smoking, no talking no cell-phones” kind of stuff. I was working for Loews at the time I ordered it and it was shipped to the theatre.
I have to search Radio Shack for the proper cables. What I have to do is record it from the VCR to my camcorder, then from there I have a cable that goes into the USB port on the computer. Or I have to find a cable with 3 RCA plugs on one end and a single USB plug on the other end.
According to the Loews July 2005 directory, seating capacities at the Loews Liberty Tree are: 207, 185, 232, 224, 90, 84, 90, 90, 315, 315, 315, 193, 492, 192, 194, 177, 90, 186, 192, 192, total of 4055 seats. There are 20 screens here. All have digital audio – ten have Dolby Digital and the other ten have Sony SDDS digital.
We had the same Million Dollar Duck story at the Westgate Cinema City in Cleveland – and whoever did it also broke open the timer box on the pylon and lit it up. The local police called the manager and made him come there to change the sign at 4 in the morning…
MJZ, mentioned above, has a daughter, MZ, who worked over at the Mercury Cinema in Middleburg Heights. She also ended up in Boston and was the payroll supervisor at the home office right up until AMC closed down the office.
Last I heard, conversion to digital was about $75G per screen. Disney’s “Chicken Little” is the next one, later on this month – and not just digital, but 3D digital. And Disney has installed the equipment at their own expense in about 85 screens nationwide.
They got the new concession stand setup, with the wood-faced counter, back-lit menu and canopy with the little light bulbs, and the blue carpet, removal of the chandeliers, dark paint job and the ‘art gallery’ wings were sheared off. I lost track of the time-line, though. The Griggs seats were changed out for American Seating (gray plastic, blue upholstery) when Mike Kowallek was the manager. I was in town and walked past the Cinema, he was in the box office and told me he finally got rid of the Griggs seats, but I don’t remember if he was there before or after Denevic. I do remember that Denevic left there to go to the Ridge Pk. Sq. when that was built, but again, since I wasn’t around there frequently I don’t remember the year. The marquee in the mall had been removed in the first remodel of the mall, around 1980. For years, until Cinema Grill took over, there was no sign in the mall, only the poster cases on each side and the little box office sign.
Now that I’m thinking about it, the first manager was Bernie Bispeck and he left in the summer of 1972 to be the DM in Baltimore. Then Lenny Mays, and he left in late 1973 to be the DM in Cincinnati. John Goodwin replaced him, and I don’t remember whatever happened to him, Then Denevic, then Kowallek, and after him I didn’t know the people there anymore. Kowallek and I had been ushers there at the same time around 1970.
BTW, in the 1970 photo, the woman in front of the stand is MJZ, who later would become the secretary to Frank S. at the home office.
The crystal chandeliers have to be new – there were never any chandeliers when it was Loews, other than a few suspended tin-can fixtures above the box office counter.
I have added a couple more pics i found to the above link – the post-GCC lobby in 2003 after the “Cinema Grill” conversion, and the boxoffice. The “Cinema Grill” thing didn’t work, and operations were taken over by Cleveland Cinemas. They retained the lobby configuration but went back to a regular concession stand menu.
In the mid-1960s one of the downtown theatres, I can’t remember which one, in the summertime would hang a painted sign on the bottom of the marquee that said “Cooled By Refrigeration”, in blue letters with icicles hanging on them. Anybody remember which theatre that was?
Anybody know what is the weekly house nut for the Ziegfeld these days? Back in the 80s it was around $30G, which was enormous at that time. The films were better and they were just squeaking by then.
Courtesy of Cinema Treasures reader ‘Pres’ I have added a photo of the RKO marquee on the Palace in 1954. Same link as above:
View link
The Hippodrome photos from Pres can be seen here:
View link
oops – its not there anymore –
Are you thinking of the Beachcliff, on Detroit Rd.?
Click on the blue ‘dave-bronx’ at the bottom of this post and it will take you to the page with my email – i’d rather not have it appear in the theatre comments – thanks –
Pres, if you want, I would be happy to post them on my photobucket page and post a link to them here. I have links on this site for pictures of the Playhouse Square theatres. The add-a-photo feature on this site hasn’t worked in ages….
It was a mess over when they were building that Four Seasons hotel.
BTW, before I forget, thanks to ‘Tonino for pointing out this article.
For those not registered for the New York Times online, I’ll paste in the article referred to above by ‘Tonino:
October 22, 2005
In Nearly All Its Grandeur, Paradise Reopens in Bronx
By JOSEPH BERGER
Stars will not be twinkling in an enchanted nighttime sky, and goldfish will not be gliding through the fountain, but otherwise Paradise – or at least the Bronx version of it – is about to be regained.
The Loew’s Paradise, a 76-year-old movie palace that gave generations of working-class strivers a taste of Old World opulence and gave generations of teenagers a haunting setting for the taste of their first kiss, is scheduled to reopen next Saturday after more than 30 years of either being boarded up or sliced up into multiple screens.
The new owner of what was once the Bronx equivalent of Radio City Music Hall has restored much of its Italian baroque grandeur. Since putting up $4.5 million to acquire the theater two years ago, the owner, Gerald Lieblich, has gotten workers to clean the cherubs, caryatids, recumbent lions, gargoyles and other statuary in the vaulted lobby and gargantuan auditorium, install almost 4,000 burgundy seats and repaint the famed midnight-blue ceiling.
Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, called the reopening “the resurrection of one of the most spectacular movie palaces ever built.”
“It was the showplace of the Bronx,” he said. “It was meant to take people out of their humdrum existence and bring them into a world of unimagined wealth and luxury.”
The Paradise will not reopen as a movie house, however. Its opening night performance is a salsa and merengue concert, clearly a bid to cater to a borough where Latinos now make up half the populace. The entrepreneurs leasing the space also plan to hold gospel, rhythm and blues and comedy acts, live boxing matches, closed-circuit sports events, beauty pageants and nostalgia acts that might appeal to onetime Bronx residents.
The entrepreneurs also plan to use the giant auditorium once more for high school graduations, and to rent out the ornate lobby and mezzanine for weddings and bar mitzvahs, perhaps even for the grandchildren of those who remember first seeing “Singin' in the Rain” or “Jailhouse Rock” at the Paradise.
However the theater is used, the reopening of the 45,000-square-foot building is another milestone in the gathering renaissance of a borough that two decades ago was known for its landscape of eviscerated buildings and Fort Apache air of menace. Indeed, the once-princely boulevard it sits on, the 99-year-old Grand Concourse, is itself being spruced up. The refurbished Loew’s Paradise is likely to dazzle a different generation of strivers and their children just as it dazzled one resident, Diane Levine Edelstein, when she was a teenager almost a half-century ago.
“You walked in and you felt you were in another world, you weren’t in a movie theater,” said Ms. Edelstein, now a senior research assistant at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We always sat in the balcony because you felt closer to heaven. I remember watching the stars and not looking at the movie.”
Others remembered its balcony as something of a lovers' lane. “I remember going to the Paradise in the late 1950’s when they were showing ‘The Ten Commandments,’ and the couple to my right was breaking nine of them,” said Stephen M. Samtur, co-publisher of Back in the Bronx magazine, a nostalgic quarterly.
Phyllis Gross Greenbaum, now a publisher of community newspapers in the Washington-Baltimore area, suggested that the Paradise stunned her and her friends because “I don’t think many of us grew up with that kind of elegance.”
The Paradise, whose five-story facade has been declared a city landmark, opened in 1929, six weeks before the stock market crashed, with a showing of the “all-talking” film, “The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu,” starring Warner Oland. Its architect was John Eberson, an Austrian immigrant who began his career designing opera houses and went on to create dozens of what were known as “atmospheric” theaters, including five “Wonder Theaters” for the Loew’s national chain in the New York area.
The Paradise’s atmospheric show included twinkling stars, rolling clouds and flying pigeons. The stage was surrounded by sculptured walls with flowing vines, cypress trees and shrubs and classical statues everywhere. In three domes set into the lobby’s filigreed ceiling, Eberson had painters execute dreamy murals of ersatz half-nude deities: Sound, Story and Film.
The grand lobby was surrounded by fluted and gilded mahogany pillars and, at mezzanine level, an arched balustrade of royal proportions. On the lobby’s north wall Eberson placed a Carrara marble fountain of a child on a dolphin. (The fountain’s pool, which once held the goldfish, will not be replaced because it would interfere with a new concessions stand.) For the cream-toned terra cotta and marble facade, Eberson designed a mechanical clock topped by St. George astride a charger slaying a fire-breathing dragon every time the clock struck the hour. The theater cost $4 million to build.
Over the years, the fountain stopped bubbling, the clock stopped working and St. George vanished around 1970, somehow lowered five stories onto a busy thoroughfare. As television made it difficult to fill the theater’s seats and middle-class audiences moved to the suburbs, the Paradise was divided up, first as a twin around 1973 and then in the early 1980’s as a quadriplex, which it remained until 1994, when, severely run-down, it closed for good.
At least one effort to resurrect it collapsed, with $1 million alone spent on gilding. But in 2003, the Paradise was taken over by Mr. Lieblich, a 44-year-old developer of small commercial buildings.
“For the last 20 years that I’ve been in the Bronx, it’s been better and better, and in the theater I saw an eyesore that needed to be brought back as the crown jewel,” Mr. Lieblich said.
With workmen still vacuuming the auditorium, Mr. Lieblich showed a reporter around, highlighting the new air-conditioning, the repointing of the facade, the replacement of reddish neons in the marquee and the replication of the original oval ticket booth. Getting the lights to twinkle again, he said, proved uneconomical. He declined to say how much he had spent.
One of the keys to making the project profitable, he said, is renting the 30,000 square feet of commercial space that is part of the theater building to a significant retailer. One has not been secured yet. A major retailer would be a step up from the shops flanking the theater to the north, a 99-cents store and one that sells furniture on credit.
The opening-night concert is an only-in-New York production. The impresarios leasing the theater are Gabriel Boter, 58, who immigrated from the former Soviet state of Georgia in 1979, and his son Richard, 30, a nonpracticing lawyer who is married to a Dominican and is fluent in Spanish. Father and son expect to schedule 35 concerts a year and 10 boxing matches, though they do not have any longtime experience in organizing events.
There are three firm bookings after opening night, including a concert sponsored by WQHT-FM 97.1 “Hot 97” and a Latina beauty contest.
“There is a strong personal attachment I found people have to the Paradise,” the younger Mr. Boter said. “That gives me a strong sense of personal responsibility to make sure that it will have the splendor and be the jewel it once was.”
They will be out of there by the end of the year….
I’m looking at the marquee photos here (http://www.archboston.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=100&start=15), and what doesn’t look right about it is that they are using reverse zip-change letters (clear letters – blk bkgrnd) and all the areas where the white plastic is exposed without a letter should be covered by black spacers. With those type of letters the only white on the marquee should be the lettering.
It is the one from the late-90s, after Sony but before the Cineplex merger – with the current red and white kleiglight logo. It isn’t what I would call a “policy” trailer, it is just that little song, no “no smoking, no talking no cell-phones” kind of stuff. I was working for Loews at the time I ordered it and it was shipped to the theatre.
I have to search Radio Shack for the proper cables. What I have to do is record it from the VCR to my camcorder, then from there I have a cable that goes into the USB port on the computer. Or I have to find a cable with 3 RCA plugs on one end and a single USB plug on the other end.
According to the Loews July 2005 directory, seating capacities at the Loews Liberty Tree are: 207, 185, 232, 224, 90, 84, 90, 90, 315, 315, 315, 193, 492, 192, 194, 177, 90, 186, 192, 192, total of 4055 seats. There are 20 screens here. All have digital audio – ten have Dolby Digital and the other ten have Sony SDDS digital.
We had the same Million Dollar Duck story at the Westgate Cinema City in Cleveland – and whoever did it also broke open the timer box on the pylon and lit it up. The local police called the manager and made him come there to change the sign at 4 in the morning…
MJZ, mentioned above, has a daughter, MZ, who worked over at the Mercury Cinema in Middleburg Heights. She also ended up in Boston and was the payroll supervisor at the home office right up until AMC closed down the office.
Last I heard, conversion to digital was about $75G per screen. Disney’s “Chicken Little” is the next one, later on this month – and not just digital, but 3D digital. And Disney has installed the equipment at their own expense in about 85 screens nationwide.
They got the new concession stand setup, with the wood-faced counter, back-lit menu and canopy with the little light bulbs, and the blue carpet, removal of the chandeliers, dark paint job and the ‘art gallery’ wings were sheared off. I lost track of the time-line, though. The Griggs seats were changed out for American Seating (gray plastic, blue upholstery) when Mike Kowallek was the manager. I was in town and walked past the Cinema, he was in the box office and told me he finally got rid of the Griggs seats, but I don’t remember if he was there before or after Denevic. I do remember that Denevic left there to go to the Ridge Pk. Sq. when that was built, but again, since I wasn’t around there frequently I don’t remember the year. The marquee in the mall had been removed in the first remodel of the mall, around 1980. For years, until Cinema Grill took over, there was no sign in the mall, only the poster cases on each side and the little box office sign.
Now that I’m thinking about it, the first manager was Bernie Bispeck and he left in the summer of 1972 to be the DM in Baltimore. Then Lenny Mays, and he left in late 1973 to be the DM in Cincinnati. John Goodwin replaced him, and I don’t remember whatever happened to him, Then Denevic, then Kowallek, and after him I didn’t know the people there anymore. Kowallek and I had been ushers there at the same time around 1970.
BTW, in the 1970 photo, the woman in front of the stand is MJZ, who later would become the secretary to Frank S. at the home office.
The crystal chandeliers have to be new – there were never any chandeliers when it was Loews, other than a few suspended tin-can fixtures above the box office counter.
Was that the Cambridge Seven redo?
I have added a couple more pics i found to the above link – the post-GCC lobby in 2003 after the “Cinema Grill” conversion, and the boxoffice. The “Cinema Grill” thing didn’t work, and operations were taken over by Cleveland Cinemas. They retained the lobby configuration but went back to a regular concession stand menu.
here is a picture of the lobby of The Beautiful Parmatown Cinema I & II – when I worked there around 1970….
View link
Wow – they painted it!
Here’s a couple of pictures of it in 1975 when I worked there – it had a different color-scheme then.
View link
Wow! it’s 40 years – when I was working at the City Cinemas years ago we had soda cups imprinted for Pacifics' Cinerama Dome 25th aniversary.
In the mid-1960s one of the downtown theatres, I can’t remember which one, in the summertime would hang a painted sign on the bottom of the marquee that said “Cooled By Refrigeration”, in blue letters with icicles hanging on them. Anybody remember which theatre that was?
Anybody know what is the weekly house nut for the Ziegfeld these days? Back in the 80s it was around $30G, which was enormous at that time. The films were better and they were just squeaking by then.