Guild 50th Street Theater

Bill Huelbig on July 27, 2005 at 9:44 am

Warren, that “Boeing Boeing” ad is wild. It’s pure ‘60’s. Check out the body measurements under each actress’ name (Thelma Ritter: ? ? ?).

BoxOfficeBill on June 29, 2005 at 12:44 pm

Here’s a Showbill Program from the Guild in November 1959. If you want to read the fine print, after you click on the URL you must click the image itself so that it enlarges on your screen. I’m sorry that the print-out won’t be so clear.

View link

View link

As a kid in the late ‘40s, I remember the Guild as a Newsreel house around the corner from RCMH. I became aware of it as a first-run foreign-film house in December ’51 when, standing on line for RCMH’s Christmas show, I noted that the Guild was premiering Alastair Sims’s “A Christmas Carol,” the London Tower Film that has become television’s archetypal holiday version over the years. Memorable films that I remember seeing at the Guild include Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim.”

“The Mouse That Roared” became Peter Sellers’s break-away hit in the USA. Three years earlier I’d seen Alec Guinness’s “Ladykillers” at the Sutton. Sellers played a small part in that film, but I didn’t remember it. “The Mouse” was deeply funny at the time (when Cold War jitters still prevailed in full force), and Sellers’s multiple-role acting was truly astonishing. One of my friends whom I’d seen it with didn’t believe that Sellers acted all three major parts. It’s a good thing that the Guild provided a Showbill to prove it. A year later, the Guild premiered “I’m All Right Jack.”

Bill Huelbig on June 3, 2005 at 11:06 am

After the Capitol, “2001” moved in September 1968 to the Cinerama (the old Warner Theater, remodeled and divided into 3) on Broadway and 47th. After that, I believe the New Embassy 46th St. got it next (in 35mm), and then the Guild. It opened in neighborhood theaters throughout the NY/NJ area in March 1969, but it must’ve been very popular in midtown since it was still playing the Guild in August.

br91975 on March 31, 2005 at 2:26 pm

Is the slope in the current Times Square Visitors Center the same slope which existed when the Embassy 1 was operating as a cinema? If so, without having seen a film there, hardbop, I easily second your point.

chconnol on January 27, 2005 at 10:11 am

Yes, I agree that that is the one. Thanks. Yet another cinema mystery solved for me.

Gerald A. DeLuca on January 27, 2005 at 8:58 am

To CConnolly:
I’m not positive, but from your description it sounds like it could have been the Cinema Rendezvous (57th Street Playhouse, etc.) It is now the Directors Guild of America Theatre and is listed at:
/theaters/7049/

Benjamin on January 16, 2005 at 9:06 pm

A few weeks ago I went back to the Rockefeller Center concourse to take a closer look at the two stairways opposite the Radio City Music Hall corridor. These two little staircases do seem a little grand for just access to the service area that I thought they led to, as they kind of symmetrically wrap around the box office which is positioned in the center.

But they still seem kind of small — and so very, very much out of the way — for a main entrance to a museum. (I once worked at a similar “underground” location in Grand Central, and people found it very inconvenient and difficult to find — although it was directly adjacent to the Times Sq. shuttle, and directly below a very easily found street address!)

I’m interested in learning more about the museum, and hope that John S. Rogers, or someone else, might be able to elaborate a bit more as to how this entrance was used? Was this concourse entrance a secondary entrance, the same way that the Music Hall entrance was a secondary entrance? It seems strange that the museum wouldn’t have a main entrance on street level, since the museum itself surely extended upwards to street level. (There are pictures, from 1936(?) and 1934, of the very high ceilinged interior of the museum in the book “Rockefeller Center” by Carol Krinksy — pgs. 90 and 142).

I checked the WPA Guide to NYC (1939) and while they have a little over two and a half pages on the Museum and mention all the subways that go to the museum, they don’t give an entrance location other than 30 Rockefeller Plaza (the RCA Building’s address facing the ice skating rink).

Here’s two descriptions of the museum from Krinksy:

“The Museum dispays occupied the hard-to-sell windowless interior ‘Forum’ space on the lowest floors of the RCA Building, extending toward the RCA Building West. The long lease made the Museum a better tenant than the occasional municipal art exhibitors or the restauranteurs originally envisioned for the area.” (page 91)

“Below the [radio] studio area [of the RCA Building] was an area which had the advantage of offering wide spans of clear space — as much as 45 feet high and 117 feet wide — but which had the disadvantage of being entirely in the unlit interior of the building. The managers and architects labored throughout the 1930s to find a suitable use for this potentially profit-making waste space. It took until 1934 for the architects … . to design the area to provide a two-syory exhibition space. It had balconies at the second floor level which led to smaller exhibition rooms. The space became the site of two Municpal Art Exhibits in 1934 and 1935. When the Musuem of Science and Industry took a fifteen-year lease beinning in January 1936, Edward Durell Stone redesigned the space to create a lively display area with stepped ramps around part of a central rotunda, a scheme not entirely remote from that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s later Guggenheim Museum … As at the Guggenheim, the public was led along a preordained path, an arrangement better suited to lively displays of basic scientific principles and technology than to the contemplation of great paintings.” (pg. 143)

Thanks in advance for any additional info that anyone can provide!

worldcity on January 14, 2005 at 6:25 pm

A less appetizing footnote to the declining condition of the Guild in its final days: On my last visit — and I do mean LAST — the audience was additionally entertained by the silhouettes of rats climbing up the side of the screen. When the action, and scrambling, moved to the floor, everyone sat with their legs pulled up, knees under their chins. On mentioning this to the manager, we were told that they had never received a complaint on that subject!

RobertR on December 17, 2004 at 3:50 pm

The Austin is now the Kew Gardens Cinemas, the Astro is the wrong name of the theatre I am thinking of.

dave-bronx™ on December 17, 2004 at 3:36 pm

Wasn’t the Austin on Austin St. In Kew Gardens Qns? It was a porno joint in the mid-1980s – I knew someone who worked there, he said an old woman owned it at that time…

br91975 on December 17, 2004 at 3:14 pm

The Embassy 72nd Street was once a newsreel house, explaining the existence of its entrance turnstile.

Benjamin on December 17, 2004 at 1:50 pm

Re: The Guild

I think the most noticeable thing about the Guild (at least for me as a kid) was its turnstyle entrance — which was very unusual for a movie theater. Now that I think about it, it seems this system was common for the newsreel theaters. I guess it’s adequate for their needs and is less expensive than a ticket taker. But I think once they switch from newsreels, the Guild still continued with the turnstyle entrance.

Although I realize that this is probably a very minor, minor consideration, I think the turnstyle — which in my mind was associated with “low class” facilities and entertainments — might have been a subtle turn off to prospective movie patrons. Kind of like, “What kind of theater and movie experience will this be — they don’t even have a ticket taker?! If I want to see this movie, I think I’ll go see it in a "real” movie theater.“ Again, I don’t think this was a major problem, but I wonder if it had a slightly subtle negative effect nevertheless.

I always wondered what the inside of this theater with the unusual entrance was like, and if memory serves I was surprised by how “normal” it was when I finally saw a movie there. In the late 1960s, I saw the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” there. I think it had already been playing all over the place for a while, and this was the last place that was contining to show it.

If I recall correctly, while not an unpleasant experience, it was something less that the “full” movie theater experience — even for a small movie theater. For instance, the small movie theaters on the Eastside have/had coffee bars, etc. — I think the Beekman even had one where you could see the movie through a window. So in some ways, I guess, it was a lesser movie experience.

Re: the underground entrance to Radio City Music Hall

As a curious kid, I always wanted to use this entrance, and if memory serves I believe I got the chance in the late 1970s when I used to escort tour groups to the Music Hall. I think we were assigned to that entrance a few times.

In it’s earlier days (1950s, 1960s, early 1970s), I have a vague recollection of seeing “knowing” patrons of the Music Hall use it as a quick and easy exit to the subway after the show, especially when it was raining. But this is just a vague recollection and maybe it’s a false “memory.”

Re: the stairways around the underground entrance to the Music Hall

Someone asked where did they lead to? It depends on which stairways are being talking about.

Unfortunately that whole area has been rebuilt — desecrated (sp?), in my opinion — and there used to be additional stairways (and additional hallways) to the ones that are there now. (For instance the grandest passageway and stairway, the one directly on axis with the subway, was replaced by income producing retail space.)

But I don’t think any of the stairways in the area lead directly to the Museum that was mentioned in a previous post. (My earliest recollections of the underground concourse, however, are mostly from the mid-1960s. And since the Museum is before my time, this is only a guess on my part.)

My recollection is that most of the stairways around that area were intended as additional passageways up to the main lobby. There was also a very small stairway opposite to the Music Hall entrance that was a stairway to, I think, a mechanical area. It was too small to appear to be a public passageway of some sort. And above that mechanical area would have been a large, movie set-like pharmacy with lunch counters, I believe. Even if this pharmacy had been the location of the Museum, it’s hard to imagine the small stairway that I think people are referring to as being a public passageway to it.

One of the great things about stairways from those times — something that architects seem to have forgotten — is that they often were designed to be an interesting “experience” in one way or another. Some of them, including I think some of the ones we are talking about, had “windows” into storefronts etc. And the larger ones, designed as main entrances for large crowds, were worthy of the Queen Mary or a Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movie.

One problem, however, is that they were built for a different “safer” age. So some of the smaller ones, even perhaps those with windows into shops, had I believe “blind” spots that might have made them somewhat dangerous in this day and age.

And the larger ones took up “too much” valuable space and were thus made into rentable, income producing areas.

DonRosen on December 13, 2004 at 1:13 pm

The Guild 50th has been featured in a few films and tv shows, most notably “The English Patient” episode on Seinfeld.