BRIC Arts Media House

When opened this was known as the Mark Strand Theatre. Then Warner Brothers had it and it became the first house in downtown Brooklyn to install W.B.’s Vitaphone sound and where Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer” opened in the early days of sound photoplays. The Strand, Majestic, Orpheum theatres where prestigious houses relegated to second hand status when counterparts Albee, Paramount and Fox Movie Palaces arrived on the scene in the mid 1920’s. During the 1932 “Pool” arrangement Fabian Theatres operated the theatre and then leased it so that he would “compete against himself” because of Strand’s location near his Fox Theatre. Fabian had it until the late 1958 and moved hits from the Fox here usually chaning the co-features. In it’s last years as a theatre, The Strand featured exploitation films dealing with juvenile delinquents, teenage pregnancy and drugs. I don’t include Loew’s Metropolitan in the brew since it was in between the old and new theatre districts of downtown and opened in 1916 in a space that was destined to be a department store.