Kew Gardens Cinemas

Thanks for mentioning this, hardbop.

Happy New Year to you and everyone else here on Cinema Treasures !

“I wonder what Kathy graduated from (or to)?:”

Hopefully not the fate of Shauna Grant, born Colleen Applegate : abortions, venereal disease, suicide by gunshot, as outlined in “Death Of A Porn Queen”, Frontline, PBS, 1987.

I would appreciate it if Lost Memory, Warren and anyone else who wants to use this wonderful site for personal vendettas would refrain from doing so. If you want to call each other names, threaten each other or anything else then kindly create a Blog for yourselves or e-mail each other but please…Keep it out of here! Thank you.

Ken… Thanks so much for posting those images. I’m glad to see that my memory wasn’t as faulty as it often is and that the old “AUSTIN” lettering from the marquee is indeed displayed in that room off the lobby. Unfortunately, beyond those glass doors at the end of the long view of the foyer you shot, there is little left (if anything) of Sandblom’s original design for the Austin’s interior.

And now that the site seems to be back up and running properly, I’d like to make a plea to both Warren and Lost Memory to indefinitely extend the unintentional cooling down period that resulted from this most recent outage. Guys, you both contribute valuable information to this site and while some may not agree with Warren’s purist vision of what this site should be just as others do not agree with the more casual conversational format Lost Memory supports, it would be a shame to see the comment threads here deterioate into a school yard pissing match (pardon my French). That, I fear, would drive more good people away from this site than any individual offense each one of us could possibly offer on our own.

So please, lay down the swords and lets continue on amicably in the spirit of our mutual admiration for this site’s nominal topic.

Here are 5 photographs I took of the Kew Gardens Cinemas in July 2003:
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/217992262/
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/217992731/
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/217993046/
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/217993407/
http://flickr.com/photos/kencta/217993711/

In 1969-‘70, we only knew this theater as the Austin up on Lefferts Blvd. My first fiancee and I were repeat customers many times during this timeframe. Since we were without cars then, we’d walk up from the BMT el on Jamaica Avenue to the Austin, perched atop a fairly steep hill. (Rough to climb in those windy winter months!)

The movie programs were varied and good, and the admission prices were always reasonable in those days. Saw a ton of movies there, including Liza Minelli’s “Sterile Cuckoo,” the re-release of Gable’s “Gone With the Wind” (1939!) and the first run of George C. Scott’s “Patton.” Brilliant!

The only downer is that Antonina had her wallet stolen out of her purse by one slick dude who was sitting behind her in the balcony one evening. (Dick Tracy Crimestopper tips in the Daily News always warned her about thievery like this, but she was one careless gal. Oh, well. So sad, too bad…)

The Austin is one local neighborhood theater I miss a lot and will will have to check out the Kew Gardens Cinema next trip back to NY.

I’m not sure if anything remains beneath the current banal facade, Native. There is a vintage work of neon signage inside a small room off the theater’s lobby (perhaps a former box office or manager’s office?) but aside from that, I believe all was gutted and lost with the multi-plexing. Perhaps, as with the Cinemart, some remnant of the original lobby exists above the current drop ceiling?

Here’s an ad from the 12/9/80 edition of the NY Post for the old XXX Austin, Olympia and Queens theaters (I presume they fell under the same ownership at the time):

Prisoners of Paradise

Typically, the small ad was clustered in a lower corner of the page with another ad for a Kung-Fu grind house feature and a few “hourly rate” motels!

pmulins, hardbop, perhaps the Kew Gardens Cinema should hire you to do their publicity, but then their ticket prices might go up, to pay your salaries ….

Yes, over the year, you can save lots of money, especially if you see at least one movie a week, like I did when I was single.

Now, I watch one of my wife’s or son’s movies each day …

pmulins, there’s also the El Greco Diner on Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, just south of the Belt Parkway.

Amazing history, a real pleasure to see first-runs at now.

I remember one time coming here in 1983 or ‘84 on a drunken excursion with a few co-workers when it was a porn theater. I’ll never forget the experience. The movie playing was something called “The Girl from S.E.X.” with a “plot” that was intended to be a spoof of a spy movie. I went with 3 other guys, one of whom I worked with at a Mini-Mart on 108th Street in Forest Hills. It was a cool early summer’s day and we were having some beers when we decided to pile into somebody’s car and take a trip to the Austin. This would be the ONLY time I ever found myself inside a real XXX house.

I can’t say I remember much about the theater’s decor, but I know that the facade was completely different than it exists now. I want to say it was a low-lying 1 or 2 story brick front, but I have no clear mental image. I also think we purchased our tickets through an outdoor ticket window – much like the one at the Polk Theater in Jackson Heights. Inside, there was a short vestibule and second set of glass doors and then a dark and decent-sized lobby with doors to the auditorium (which ran straight back to the screen wall in a line from the sidewalk) and stairs up to the balcony.

We sat up in the balcony, which one entered through an open hallway from the staircase landing. The balcony appeared very shallow and I seem to recall that the seating included a couple of sofas at the rear!!! As we sat to watch the movie, a sense of discomfort sat in with all of us. As we talked before the movie began we decided to call each other by names other than our own (partially in jest and partially for the sake of anonymity)… but in our drunkeness, we had forgotten the names we had been using so that each time one of us addressed another, we’d use a completely different name than before. We joked that anyone below us in the orchestra might think there were 10 or 12 of us up there instead of the 4 that we actually were. We didn’t get more than 20 minutes into the feature when we all sort of freaked out over the gentleman in the overcoat who had come in and stood silently in the row directly behind us. Having had enough, we elected to walk out before much longer, never learning if, in the end, the Girl from S.E.X. was able to “finish off” the bad guy (though, we can assume that she did exactly that… to their mutual satisfaction)!

I’ve been back a couple of times since the theater reinvented itself in 1999 or so as a multiplex for the more discerning film goer, but it has been a few years. I think I saw “Chocolat” and “Being John Malkovich” here and possibly “About Schmidt”. Parking can be a bit problematic, but the effort is rewarded with an eclectic selection of films that usually do not reach the outer boroughs. If I recall, there is a small room off to the side of the lobby where an original neon sign for the Austin is on display. That’s a nice touch. The way the theater itself has been carved up sort of reminds me of how the Fantasy in Rockville Center was subdivided.

Go for those bargains, hardbop !

Fortunately, the Kew Gardens, formerly the Austin, is not in the middle of nowhere, but is at a busy, easily accessible location, convenient to subway, bus, LIRR and walking.