The Metro Theater (formerly the Midtown Theater and Embassy's New Metro Twin) is a defunct movie theater at 2626 Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was designed by architecture firm Boak and Paris and built between 1932 and 1933. The theater is designed in the Art Deco style and originally contained 550 seats. Although the theater's interior was demolished after it was closed in 2005, the original facade remains intact and is a New York City designated landmark.
The Metro Theater's facade on Broadway is about three and a half stories tall. The ground story contains an entrance, storefront windows, and ticket windows. Above the theater's main entrance is a marquee, which spans most of the theater's frontage and extends almost to the curb. The upper portion of the facade is made of terracotta and is divided vertically into three sections; the central section includes a decorative polychromed medallion. The main auditorium originally contained a proscenium arch with niches containing statues. Originally a single auditorium, the interior had been split into two auditoriums by the early 2000s before it was demolished.
A.C. and H.M. Hall acquired an apartment building at 2626 Broadway in 1931 and replaced it with the Midtown Theater, which opened on June 2, 1933. The theater presented first-run films until the 1950s, when it began to show art-house films. The Midtown operated as a porn theater in the 1970s and early 1980s. Dan Talbot acquired the lease to the theater in 1982 and began screening films in repertory, splitting the theater into two auditoriums in 1986. Cineplex assumed the theater's lease in 1987 and sold it to Cablevision, parent company of Clearview Cinemas, in 1998. After a 2004 renovation by Peter H. Elson, who operated it for a year, the Metro closed permanently in November 2005 and was gutted the next year. Its owner, Albert Bialek, unsuccessfully attempted to lease out the theater in the late 2000s and the 2010s to Urban Outfitters, Wingspan Arts, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (twice), Planet Fitness, and Blink Fitness. After Bialek died, the Upper West Side Cinema Center bought the theater in 2025.
Site The Metro Theater, originally the Midtown Theater, is located at 2624–2626 Broadway, on the eastern sidewalk between 99th and 100th Streets, in the Manhattan Valley and Upper West Side neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The land lot covers and is rectangular, with a frontage of on Broadway and a depth of . The Metro Theater abuts St. Michael's Episcopal Church and the New York Public Library's Bloomingdale Library to the east, as well as the Ariel East residential tower to the north. The Columbus Square development is one block to the east of the Metro Theater.
The section of Broadway between 59th and 110th Streets once contained 18 movie theaters, including the Metro. By 1989, only four such theaters remained on Broadway, as these cinemas were generally smaller neighborhood theaters, which struggled to compete with larger multiplex theaters. The Metro was the only remaining movie theater on the Upper West Side stretch of Broadway by the beginning of the 21st century.
Architecture The Metro Theater was designed in the Art Deco style by Boak & Paris, composed of Russell M. Boak and Hyman F. Paris, who studied under architect Emery Roth. The developer was A.C. and H.M. Hall. Although the theater's facade largely contains vertically oriented decorations, there are some horizontal design elements on the theater's marquee and outermost doorways, which may be an allusion to the Streamline Moderne style.
Facade The only visible facade of the Metro Theater is the primary facade on Broadway, which is about three and a half stories tall. It is divided into the ground floor entrance and the glazed-terracotta upper section. The theater's facade uses rose-colored and black terracotta, an inexpensive decorative element at the time of the Metro's construction, when funding was scarce. The ground story contains a black terracotta frame, which surrounded three glass double doors. The original ticket window was outside the theater. When the theater opened, there were two glass doors left of this entrance, which were replaced when the ticket window was moved inside in 1954. There was an aluminum-and-glass storefront, with a display window and doorway, right of the entrance. The outermost portion of the ground story contains aluminum doors with vertical grooves, flanked by horizontal gray and black bands.
Above the theater's main entrance is the marquee, which spans most of the theater's frontage and extends almost to the curb. The marquee is made of metal and is suspended from the upper facade via eyebars. A series of four horizontal chrome bands wrap around the north, west, and south faces of the marquee. Similar to the Variety Theater, Boak & Paris used lights on the underside of the marquee. When the theater was built, there were 200 lights on the marquee's underside, but this was reduced to 22 lights by the late 1980s. Above the north and south faces of the marquee are red neon letters spelling "Metro" in Art Deco-style letters, which were installed when the theater was renamed in 1982. There are black terracotta blocks on the facade on either side of the marquee.
The upper portion of the facade is made of terracotta and is divided vertically into three sections. The outer sections are variously described as being pink or "rosy beige" in color. Maroon bands divide the outer sections of the facade into L-shaped segments. The central part of the upper facade is demarcated by black pilasters with maroon borders on either side, which protrude from the wall and curve above the roofline. The middle of the central section contains vertical aluminum bars, which taper in a triangular pattern above the roofline. These bars are interrupted by a polychromed medallion with masks symbolizing comedy and tragedy. The medallion has a lavender background and a horizontal yellow band with two off-white or beige figures, which appear to be holding blue and gray masks. This medallion is similar in design to Hildreth Meière's plaques on the facade of Radio City Music Hall, but Meière most likely did not create the theater's medallion. There is a maroon coping at the top of the facade; the coping above the outer sections of the facade is flat, while the coping above the center section is wavy.
Interior When the Metro Theater was in operation, its lobby was decorated with red glass-block columns. The theater originally contained 550 seats, split across two levels in a stadium seating layout. seating arrangement was changed multiple times over the years and was split into two screens in 1986: a 200-seat upper auditorium and a 325-seat lower auditorium. Toward the end of its original run in 2004, the upper auditorium contained 292 seats, while the lower auditorium contained 188 seats. The proscenium arch, at the front of the theater, was flanked by niches containing statues of nude women holding glowing dishes. These niches also contained grilles. A band of floral ornament ran across the ceiling and side walls. The aisles were illuminated by lights in a fan pattern.
The entire interior was completely demolished in 2006. The modern-day theater building contains of usable space on two above-ground stories. The basement covers and has ceilings.
History
Development Large movie palaces became common in the 1920s between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression. In the New York City area, these movie palaces often had between 2,000 and 6,000 seats. The onset of the Depression forced many theatrical operators in New York City to build smaller theaters with between 500 and 1,000 seats. As such, most of New York City's Art Deco-style theaters, built during this time period, were small-scale cinemas serving local neighborhoods.
Just prior to the construction of what became the Midtown Theater, the site at 2624–2626 Broadway was occupied by a seven-story apartment building, which the Welton estate sold to Irving I. Lewine in November 1930. Lewine initially intended to build another structure on the site. The A. C. and H. M. Hall Realty Company bought the vacant apartment building in June 1931, with plans to replace it with a two-story commercial structure. By that November, the site had been cleared. Boak and Paris had finalized plans for a small theater in December 1932, and Hall Realty received a building permit for the theater the next month. Brohall Realty, led by Arlington C. Hall, leased the theater to Lee A. Ochs of Midway Theatre Inc. for 21 years beginning in March 1933, with annual rent that would gradually increase from $17,500 to $22,500. J. J. Secoles was the theater's general contractor.
Operation
Early years The Midtown Theater opened on June 2, 1933, and received its certificate of occupancy five days later. Despite its name, the theater was on the Upper West Side and was not near Midtown Manhattan. From its opening through the 1940s, the theater presented first-run films, namely films that had just been released by movie studios. Among the films screened at the Midtown were Goose Step, The Seventh Veil, and Moonlight Sonata, as well as revivals of films such as The Scoundrel and Catherine the Great. The theater's developer, Hall Realty, owned the theater until the 1940s, after which it was sold several times. Crain's New York magazine wrote that the Midtown "showed Marx Brothers comedies and romances starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn" at the peak of its popularity. The Midtown Theater switched to showing foreign films in December 1948, starting with the French film Secrets of a Ballerina.
During the 1950s, the Midtown hosted foreign films such as The Blue Angel, Jofroi, and A Day In The Country. The theater also presented art-house films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Buñuel and Roman Polanski during the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, the Midtown had begun to show pornographic films, a use that continued well into the next decade. A New York Times reporter said that the theater's conversion into a porn theater of one of many "signs for the optimist and for the pessimist" in the immediate surrounding area. At the time, the stretch of Broadway between 96th and 110th Streets had experienced significant social decline and contained numerous single room occupancy buildings.
Late 20th century
Dan Talbot, an operator of multiple cinemas on the Upper West Side, acquired the Midtown Theater in August 1982 and stopped showing porn movies there. The Midtown was instead renovated for $300,000 and began to host foreign films in a repertory format. The Midtown reopened as the Metro on October 1, 1982; its first foreign films were a double bill of the films Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The renovated Metro Theater had 535 seats, making it the largest repertory theater in Manhattan, as well as one of the largest theaters in the borough that exclusively showed revivals of old films. After the renovation, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote: "The seats are comfortable and the long, comparatively narrow auditorium is such that I don't think it will ever be possible for anyone to 'twin it'" (i.e. convert the Metro into a two-screen theater). The theater began to host events such as Perspectives on French Cinema, an annual showcase of ten French films. The Metro's repertory programming was popular, and a Times article in 1984 said the Metro's audiences were "perhaps, the most serious and best behaved in the city".