The "Wonders" Of Old Movie Palaces In Queens And Brooklyn

One of my favorite movie-related blogs, Scouting NY, has an incredible post up this week about the old Paramount movie palace in downtown Brooklyn that was converted to a student center for Long Island University. Though the school turned the main auditorium space into a basketball court/gym, they also retained a great deal of the decorative features of the grand lobby and the ornate lounges. There are some remarkable before/after photos on the post which compare the grand luxury of the Paramount back in the day, to its more low-key quirkiness today. But some of the details, like etched mirrors and face casts on the ceiling, are very cool to see....mainly for the fact they are still there!

In a previous post this year, ScoutingNY took a Sunday afternoon tour of another repurposed movie palace on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. It was actually one of the five Loew's Wonder theaters in NY/NJ, all of which have remarkably survived. I have been to the one in Jersey City across from the PATH train which was pretty impressive. But this one takes the ornate-cake. It's Spanish-Moorish theming is totally over the top and has been completely preserved as it was when the theatre was in its heydey. The reason is that it was donated to a church group which regularly has services in the auditorium which holds 3,000-plus people. The photos are really incredible and reminded me of the Tampa Theatre in Florida (where I screened WTC VIEW and POOL DAYS) which has the same faux-Spanish village open-to-the-sky feeling inside. 

I can only imagine what it must have been like to see films in such a luxurious setting. Maybe even bad movies would have seemed good!  :)  Regardless, it would certainly have been an improvement over today's generic stadium-seating boxes. 

A Mansion Grows in Brooklyn

One of my newest blog discoveries is Scouting. It consists of pictures of unusual things found  by a very intrepid and curious NYC film location scout.  Last week, he posted about a beautiful historic mansion in a most unlikely place...Brooklyn's East River waterfront.  The Scouting blogger rightly describes it "like someone picked up an estate from Long Island’s Gold Coast and plunked it down in Vinegar Hill."  


The mansion is the former Commandant's House for what used to be the Brooklyn Naval Station, adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Built in 1805, the house, which looks to have some spectacular views of the East River and lower Manhattan, has been privately owned since the early 1960's and the current owner is Charles Gilbert, a neurobiologist with the Rockefeller Foundation.   There's a more 3-D view of the manse he found on Bing which I've reposted below.


Anyway, it's a fascinating little bit of way old New York tucked into an unlikely corner. Amazing what you will find in this city if you just look...