West End Theatre
52nd Street & New Utrecht Avenue,
Brooklyn,
NY
11219
52nd Street & New Utrecht Avenue,
Brooklyn,
NY
11219
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The West End Theatre was a small movie house which was opened prior to 1914. It showed silent movies. By October 1915 it was owned by The Unity Amusement Co. Inc. with Oscar Muller as President and Samuel Schwartz as Treasurer, and they turned around the fortunes of the theatre. In 1922 and 1923 it was owned by Hyman Britwar.
In 1921 the much larger Boro Park Theatre was built and opened by B.F. Keith adjacent to the West End Theatre. In July 1923 both theatres were taken over by Loew’s Inc, who planned to operated the West End Theatre as a full time movie theatre, and the Boro Park Theatre was to be used for vaudeville only. Loew’s soon closed the West End Theatre to expand the programing of the Borough Park Theatre to include movies & vaudeville. The West End Theatre had a large vertical sign in front but no marquee. A 1919 photograph of the facade is in the Brooklyn Library collection.
In recent years it has been in use as a banquet hall. When seen in 2015 it had been converted into a Jewish college, and the auditorium has been divided horizontally at balcony level to create two levels of study rooms.
Contributed by
ERD
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Recent comments (view all 4 comments)
The West End theatre was built on New Utrecht avenue when the West End train line was on street level. It was one of the earliest movie theatres built in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn
The photo from the Brooklyn Library was taken in 1918 after the “El"
was built on New Utrecht Avenue. The silent picture featured was Paramount’s "My Cousin”, a comedy starring Enrico Caruso.(Adolph Zukor had signed the famous operatic tenor to make three silent movies for his studio. Although Caruso couldn’t be heard, his movie debut was a success)
Unlike Pavarotti, whose only film in 1981 was a dud.
Building also housed a bowling alley sometime in the late 1960’s.