RKO Shore Road Theatre

The Shore Road Theatre was once operated by 56-year-old Andrew Lo Blanco, who took his own life by shooting himself in the mouth with a .30-.30 caliber rifle after stabbing his 38-year-old wife Mary Lo Blanco (a sales worker at Abraham & Straus) with a hunting knife 20 times in the chest to death at their home of 1158 83rd Street of Brooklyn on July 30, 1949. The NYPD investigated a note shortly after finding the body of Mary lying on the floor of the hallway, reading “I can’t stand the disgrace which you have caused the family by running with other men”. Neighbors nearby said that they did not heard anything at all, not even a single gunshot from Andrew’s suicide. Andrew telephoned Mary, who was at her sister’s house, Molly Archetetto, at 754 Bushwick Avenue, when Andrew told her on the phone “If you don’t hear from me by 11:00, get the police and come to the house”. After the discovery of the tragedy, she told NYPD that her brother had left something at the house earlier that day with a rifle wrapped inside a newspaper. He told her that he was going to try a reconciliation with his wife. The family had two other children, who were adults at the time of the incident. Robert (who was part of Brooklyn Tech) and Andre, were working part-time at a nearby grocery store of 7116 13th Avenue around the time Andrew committed suicide.

Photo from Brooklyn Pics uploaded

mp775-Great link! My first time ever seeing a photo of the RKO Shore Road. I have to be honest. When I did the scroll through the 1980’s shot blew me away too. I almost forgot about the “Martin Paint” and “fayva” shoe store. When I was a young kid durning the 80’s I never realized that building was once a movie theater. I could always tell by looking at the building up the block (The RKO Dyker) that it once was a movie theater.

It was not a Loews Theatre in 1956.I know that much Tls.

With the massive expansion of the Century 21 department store over to 87th St., it is surprising that the store management did not take over this retail space.

On May 5, 1993, The Brooklyn Spectator published two pages of Bay Ridge movie palace memories written by Andrew Johnson and John Cocchi.

Here they are:
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lostmemory—

Thanks for catching my fudge of the dimensions. After taking into account the lobby space at the entrance and the space for the narrow stage apron before the screen, the auditorium’s interior was still wider than long, and that’s the anomaly that sticks in my mind’s eye. And with the relatively small screens of the 1940s-50s, the viewing area at the RKO SR couldn’t have been more than 12x15 (or unlikely 15x18) maximum.

This means, with a proscenium frontage of 86 feet, no more than 15 (or generously 18) feet were given to the screen’s width. Hence, my memory of an elongated, top-shortened proscenium and burgundy traveler curtain, with side-auditorium seats angled uncomfortably toward the center.

But above all, lostmemory, thanks for every wonderful shred of detail that you’ve contributed to this site over the past months.

A current photo of the building that was the RKO Shore Road was posted today on the Bay Ridge Blog, www.bayridgebrooklyn.blogspot.com

Jeffrey, Theaterat, and Jody—

Thanks for the updates. I rarely attended this theater as a toddler, since its fare hit the Alpine first and lured me and my family to that venue; but I do remember seeing there some remarkable films.

One was Cecil B. DeMille’s “Unconquered,” which had opened at the Rivoli on 10 Oct. ‘47, and so must have made its way to the Shore Road early in 1948: the climactic escape down the river and over the waterfall scared me under the seat. Another was Zinnemann’s “The Search,” which had opened at the Victoria on 23 March '48, and so must have played at the SR during the following summer: the unbearably painful separation of the child from his mother deeply affected me at the age of six, and haunts me still—what a vulnerable age I was to see that film.

The confusion of the theater’s name with that of the nearby Cantonese restaurant (earlier located at a site closer to 5 Avenue than its present location near 4 Avenue) also caused heartache. One fine Spring day, my mom spontaneously proposed, “Let’s go the Shore Road today!” I leapt with joy. It turned out that she had meant the eatery, not the movie palace. That afternoon, I sobbed woefully in my chop suey.

Looks like this structure is going to be demolished. The side wall(that faces 4th Av) has a huge chunk of bricks missing. You can see inside the 2nd. floor balcony? level, but none of the theater seems to remain.

How can you describe a theater that’s been dead for more than fifty years? I’ll try. It was not a great theater, but an odd one. Chiefly, it was much wider than deep. Its depth extended half the city block, approximately 90’. With the still-existing building, you can see today that its rear wall hits the property line of the private homes behind it on 85 Street. (If you walk up that street, you can view the rear wall by looking down the two or three alleys separating these homes.) Its width extends about 110’ along busy 86 Street. (The ever popular Century Department Storeâ€"the very first, parent-original one that dates to the early ‘60sâ€"faces it across the street.)

The windowless red-brick façade with shallow stone-fluted columns rises somewhat more than three stories. The pitched roof behind the facade rises higher than four stories. The main body of the building comes to an abrupt stop about 70’ in depth from the front. The remaining 20’ is a one-and-a-half story extension that housed the proscenium and screen, as well as several rows of front seats. Because there were absolutely no fly-space and no stage apart from a shallow apron, the theater was designed for movies only. And the building’s extreme width must have made for some uncomfortable screen-viewing from the far sides.

The box office faced the street, and a shallow but wide ticket-taker lobby led into a likewise shallow but wide interior promenade with a candy-stand in the middle and staircases to the balcony at either end. Nestled beneath these staircases were rest rooms, each gender to a side. The stairs led to a relatively capacious balcony whose rear abutted the façade, and whose front curved at an inward concave several yards from where the building’s main section joined the proscenium extension. The orchestra section was quite shallow as, with allowances for the lobby, promenade, and screen-apron, it could have measured no more than 60’ in depth: might that have allowed for about twenty-four rows of seats? The greater width would have allowed for three central- and two side-aisles.

The outside and inside ornamentation was fairly restrained. The large marquee sported blinking and running yellow lights around the trapezoidal RKO logo and theater name, with white-lettering on black-plate film titles. As with many RKO houses of that era, I remember the lobby’s black granite siding, white marble flooring, and brass-plated doors (any of it faux?). The interior style seemed a restrained beaux-arts, if by that term you mean a dominant Italian classicism punctuated by some eclectic but faint baroque features. The page on this site for the nearby RKO Dyker describes the latter’s style as Baroqueâ€"no, no, hardly so: both theaters were Palladian on the cheap: no side boxes, no proscenium bas reliefs, no tapestries, but the suggestion of organ screens on each side (neither theater had one) and some shallow fluted columns, with a recessed dome in the center ceiling. A lightly ornamented shell-like tympanum descended from the ceiling to the top of the space where the proscenium extension began. A few modern-style lighting fixtures descended from the ceiling. The color scheme was a grey-ivory or dull-beige. I remember the wide but shortened curtain as burgundy.

The films were subsequent-runs inherited from nearby Loew’s Bay Ridge, which had inherited its fare from Loew’s Alpine. If I’m right, the last film was “Inside Straight,” which had opened at either the Capitol or Loew’s State in March ’51. It would have made its way to the Shore Road by late May. Possibly the theater had poor air conditioning, and so the management closed it before summer took charge? The marquee came down quickly. Three or four large store-fronts then took over the ground floor: Davega Sports, Davoe Paints, latterly The Wiz. The second floor housed a series of dance studios, insurance carrier offices, and the like. On the third floor, a fairly successful banquet facility held sway for several decades. I’ve come to imagine that this facility kept the theater’s recessed dome and tympanum decoration for ornament. If I had the wit to check it out, I could have done so. But now I live more than 200 miles away. Folks in the neighborhood might want to investigate.