The Vibrant Past And Bleak Future Of Ditmas Park Movie Theaters

With the announcement of the $10 million renovation to the Pavilion Theater in Park Slope, Ditmas Park residents may be asking “What about us?”

There are currently no movie theaters in the neighborhood, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon, according to a real estate broker with encyclopedic knowledge of Brooklyn commercial properties.

“The biggest issue is the size of the plot that would be required,” said Bill O’Brien, a broker with commercial real estate firm M.C. O’Brien, located on Avenue N. “A newly constructed theater would need onsite parking.” For example, a 40,000 square foot theater, which is on the small side for a multiplex, would be required to provide parking for 500 cars.

Theaters built before the 1950s, however, are grandfathered-in and don’t face the same parking requirements, O’Brien said.

O’Brien is a third-generation realtor. His grandfather founded M.C. O’Brien in 1909, and the younger O’Brien grew up learning the major boulevards of Brooklyn alongside his ABCs. Point to a major building in the borough, and there’s a good chance he knows how much it’s worth and who has occupied it since the day it was built. And if he doesn’t, his office has historical maps of Brooklyn that capture development from way before standard zoning was adopted by the city in the 1950s.

The Kent Theater in Midwood, at 1168 Coney Island Avenue near Avenue H, has been around long enough that the young Woody Allen, who grew up in Midwood, was a frequent visitor. As a director, Allen even filmed scenes at the Kent Theater for his 1985 feature, The Purple Rose of Cairo.

But what once was a modest single-screen theater has been divided into three very small auditoriums, and the theater’s decor is showing signs of age.

The Pavilion Theater, which will be transformed into the seven-screen Nitehawk Prospect Park by 2017 (based on Nighthawk Cinema in Williamsburg), is a huge development — but it’s a twenty-minute bus ride north of Ditmas Park, at 188 Prospect Park West near 14th Street.

If restrictive zoning regulations make building a new movie theater unlikely, is refurbishing an existing theater an option for Ditmas Park? Probably not, because many of those buildings have been demolished or converted to more economically attractive businesses, and overall New York is trending toward fewer cinemas.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City lost 22 percent of its movie theaters between 2001 and 2010, reported The Real Deal.

“There are several theaters around Flatbush that were converted to houses of worship, none of which I know to be for sale,” O’Brien explained. The Cinema Treasures website records the location of several theaters in the neighborhood, most of them are long gone — with one notable exception.

The Kings Theater, which opened as a live performance venue in 2015 after undergoing a $95 million renovation, originally opened in 1929 as one of the five Loew’s Wonder Theaters in the city. It continued screening movies for almost 50 years, closing in 1977 after a showing of George C. Scott in Islands in the Stream.

There are at least five other defunct Ditmas movie theaters whose visual imprint on the neighborhood has all but been erased. The Newkirk Theater was located at 597 East 16th Street, where the C Town grocery store now stands.

The Dorchester Photoplay was at 828 Coney Island Avenue at Dorchester Road, and the Cortelyou Photoplay at 1524 Cortelyou Road at East 16th Street — but both theaters had come and gone before 1940.

The Leader Theater, on Coney Island Avenue between Newkirk and Ditmas Avenues, lasted into the 1960s, later graduating to a bowling alley and then a disco. But the property has since been gutted and subdivided.

2101 Church Avenue near Flatbush Avenue, the building that houses Walgreens and Modell’s, cycled between four movie theaters. And if you look closely at the building, you can see its cinematic grandeur peeking through.

2101 Church Avenue has quite a history; it opened as vaudeville house in 1928 with seating for 2,500. Converted to the RKO Keith’s Kenmore theater four years later, it exhibited first-run movies and competed with the Kings Theater around the corner. By 1999, it had been divided into a 4-screen multiplex and re-branded as the Kenmore Quad. During a Friday night showing of Life starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence in April that year, a patron was shot and killed in a dispute over seating. The police shuttered the theater; it was sold and gutted three years later when Modell’s moved in.

“If that building [2101 Church Avenue] had the certificate of occupancy from when it operated as a theater, it might be grandfathered, though it would still have some code compliance issues,” O’Brien said.

The certificate of occupancy (C of O), the legal document that identifies how the owner of a building can use the property, is a key requirement. A building owner generally has the right to operate the business listed on the C of O without making substantial changes to the building. That is why the Pavilion will be able to proceed so quickly with renovations.

So if the regulatory and economic barriers to new theaters are so daunting, what about the Alamo Drafthouse in the City Point development in Downtown Brooklyn, which had been scheduled to open this summer? O’Brien pointed out that the site, the former Albee Square Mall, has onsite parking, relied on the efforts of a number of different experienced developers, and received significant tax incentives from the City.

“And it still has been a 9-year process, involving City oversight, several revamps on the project and several new directions,” O’Brien noted. That theater was scheduled to open this summer, according to Alamo’s VP for special events Henri Mazza.

But per an August 26 notice on the Alamo’s website, “Getting a business open in New York is complicated” and now the opening date remains uncertain.

Alamo is also more than a movie theater — its a diverse business model featuring meals and beverages served tableside in the theater, opening up multiple revenue streams.

The Nitehawk takes a similar approach, offering a menu with dinner specials created to match each of the films playing on the three screens at the Williamsburg triplex. Viragh told the New York Times that their plans for the Pavilion include “two bar areas, a restored atrium overlooking the park, and, of course, in-theater dining.”

That leaves the successful development of a movie theater in Ditmas Park, or anywhere closer than Park Slope, very unlikely. “I know of no space in Ditmas Park or most of Brooklyn that has that big a footprint, and hasn’t already been developed, aside from some emerging areas like Red Hook, Bushwick, or East New York,” O’Brien said.

Technically, a developer who wanted to open an independent triplex on Cortelyou Road could apply to the city and the community board for a variance. “But that is a 12-month process that entails significant legal costs with no guarantee of a victory,” said O’Brien.