It’s been a while since the last Abandoned Matinees post, though not due to a lack of new finds, but merely time, and a strange phenomenon known as Klathwathiusmus Constrictus, which actually causes the months to move beyond the Earth’s rotation, pushing us from January to June. Pity the phenom is merely a freak of interstellar nature and cannot be harnessed to hasten moments of exceptional dullness.
The latest installment focuses on The Regal Cinema, which opened in August of 1932 in Camberley, U.K., under the ownership of the Robins Cinemas, then became an Odeon cinema, followed by the Cannon circuit until the idiot team of Golan & Globus overextended themselves, causing the collapse of their once potent indie company. (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michael Dudikoff, Lucinda Dickey, and J. Lee Thompson could only do so much with Cannon scripts, you know.)
The Robins repurchased the cinema, and what was once a 1000+ seat single screen venue was twinned and tripled, uglifying the once beautifully exotic Art Deco building.
Most abandoned buildings tend to sit and rot, with passersby losing their curiosity and concern in favour of indifference, particularly when the edifice is part of a daily walk. To some, a dying building maintains an allure, and for urban explorers, an opportunity to check out the hidden and the forgotten knowing the wrecker’s ball will likely raze the building into rubble very soon.
Here, for example, is a snapshot of the Regal in 1980, with its façade painted stark white, and rebranded as The Classic Cinema. Now note its present condition in the first image of this set, taken in April of 2010. Compare that with additional angles (3) which gradually reveal the fires which destroyed significant portions of its superstructure.
Now lets examine the interior in this detailed set, taken in August of 2009, which seems to precede at least some of the more damaging fires set by vandals. Note the projector (near end) which is still standing… and was likely toppled (images 12 - 16) by vandals prior to April, 2010.
It’s a classic idiot teen moment preserved in pristine dust: ‘Hey! Look! A still-standing large object that appears heavy! Let’s make it fall over! Because if we can, it’s all brilliant! 20 years from now, the memories of that great day will feel as good as buying our first legal beer!’
While the building was still erect as of January, 2011, the fencing and demolition signage are likely precursors to the end. Every city has had a building like this, dying slowly and coming to an ignominious end.
Pity.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Showing posts with label Abandoned Matinees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abandoned Matinees. Show all posts
Abandoned Matinees V: R.I.P. The York Theatre
Still… Why triangles?
In any event, this week the ad under the spotlight is The Mug Restaurant and Eatery, which according to author Jamie Bradburn likely evolved into the J.J. Muggs chain. That name rings a bell, but what stood out in the piece was the contextual intro in which Bradburn sets things in 1982, and prior to visiting the new restaurant, one may have gone to catch Richard (‘Dickie’) Attenborough’s latest directorial venture, Gandhi – arguably his best film to date because it captured the idiocy of colonial rule, which was less about guiding funny looking people towards the virtues of a democratic system and shiny happy railway lines, but establishing a racist class system to extract as many natural resources before the locals wised up and starting marching with pitchforks towards Government House, screaming 'English bastards!.'
Specifically mentioned is the York Theatre which was, in 1982, one of the best cinemas in the city. The York, a two-screen cinema, wasn’t pretty from the outside; it was bland, functional, and it was really tough to deduce when it was built because its interior – judging by the curvy lines and stucco walls - was redesigned some time in the seventies.
On street level, there were a set of double-doors before one hit the oddly placed box office, after which there lay an open floor, at the end of which was the concession stand, flanked by doorless washroom entrances for les homes and les dames. Each short entrance curved inward and behind the concession stand, and managed to dampen any ‘noises’ that may have deterred hungry patrons from buying munchies and pop.
On the ground floor was Cinema 1, and to the left of that area was a vey wide and winding staircase leading up to Cinema 2. A glass paneled window from the ground floor to the staircase’s ceiling let in a fair amount of light, and once on the second floor where Cinema 2 lay, was was a small concession stand to the right (usually closed, unless it was a busy weekend night), and to the left entrances for the small washrooms.
(Most people used the downstairs loos, but the upstairs were often freer because few remembered they were up there. You had to step down to enter the Men’s Room, and perhaps the only hint of the York’s age was the wooden door which never closed properly, and looked another 10-20 years older because of the layers of matte greenish-gray paint that had been applied and re-applied.)
The upper Cinema is the one I remember the most, and where the Big Films tended to play. That’s where I saw Gandhi with a church group (from which I later fled) one afternoon, and I’m pretty sure we caught the film in 70mm 6-track Dolby, a form of exhibition that’s kind of dead, unless you recently headed down to the TIFF Bell Lightbox for 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia.
Cinema 2 had two levels. The entrance had you emerging in a middle aisle: upwards was the ersatz balcony, and downwards the main orchestra level. Surprisingly, we often sat in the front end of the balcony because the view was better, but the reason most people went to the York was its superb sound.
In 1982, the premiere Dolby venues were the York, the Hyland, and the University, followed perhaps by the Eglington.
They’re all dead, and with the York finally sold for its land to a condo developer, the last of my most fondly remembered cinemas will vanish.
The York’s demise seemed to begin when the projectionists went on strike during the exhibition of Vertigo, if I recall. Universal trumpeted the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film in grand style: 70mm 6-track Dolby.
This is where memory gets a bit fuzzy, but I think it was the York’s print of Vertigo that got scratched during a print check, and may have screened for audiences for a scant few days before Cineplex wanted to radically knock down the wages of its unionized projectionists.
When the strike began, the York was affected, and the chance to see the film in widescreen / big sound was lost. Eventually the strike was resolved, but Vertigo was long gone from its theatrical run.
The union projectionists were fired, and some were later re-hired for a terrible wage that resulted in many films being screened out of focus in other theatres (like the Varsity), be it for general patrons or actual press screenings, embarrassing studio reps who were siked to show critics the latest big film in what should’ve been a competent, straightforward screening.
This is a bit of a digression, but several things killed the York as a cinema: the strike, the erection of the Silver City at Yonge & Eglington Centre, and people who perhaps felt it was too much of a walk to reach the York. When it was shuttered, I’m sure the surrounding restaurants lost a lot of business, and went through their own struggles to keep afloat.
For years one could walk past the York, and see it shuttered and ignored, but its most ignominious fate occurred when the ground level was transformed into a health club. This was one of the more viable options new lease holders and owners had with old movie theatres.
The old Don Mills Cinema - where Universal screened the five newly minted prints of Hitchcock films previously unavailable for two decades: Rope, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, and (surprise) Vertigo – was soon shuttered after these films ran, and was to have become a Bally’s until those plans died, and the 2-screen cinema was bulldozed into oblivion. (Films I recall seeing there were Close Encounter of the Third Kind with cartoons, F/X, and the aforementioned Hitchcock quintet.)
The York then became an event locale – I think it was called something like the Drambuie Theatre – with bright purple lighting out front, and then it was closed again.
In 2002, the owners of the Capitol Event Theatre – another cinema converted into a multi-purpose hall - snapped up the York and spent a fair chunk on its renovation, rebranding the cinema’s shell into the York Event Theatre.
Like the Don Mills, there are no pictures of its interior from its days as a cinema, but one poster offered a snapshot of the York's current uglification (scoot down to the page bottom), and Celebrate.ca contains a brief listing with 3 pictures of what sees to have been the ground floor where the concession stand rested, the smaller concession stand at the top of the upper staircase, and banquet hall in what was Cinema 1.
The converted Cinema 2 can be glimpsed in one still at Stipcophoto, and a wedding party snapped by Bostonimages.com.
That’s where Gandhi ran in 70mm.
According to a the scant records online, the events venue was much larger than the Capitol, and did attract a business, but perhaps the offers and timing to develop the land into a condo proved too hard to turn down, although by 2010 the York had nothing connected to film exhibition. Once you gut the interior, it’s a ghost, and as beneficial as it is to reuse a structure rather than raze it to the ground, the death of a once premiere cinema venue is one to mourn because it marks a significant shift in the way we catch movies.
One can only theorize whether the original York could’ve survived as a neighbourhood cinema after the area underwent a massive condo building boom, or whether the tenants and owners came with wholly different expectations of how and where to catch movies.
The good news is the proposed condo – dubbed The Madison - isn’t ugly; it’s actually a striking twin tower edifice that fits over the old York’s shell and the same-sized parking lot that existed beside the cinema during the eighties. The architects: Kirkor, who coincidentally designed the Toronto International Film Festival Tower atop the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
If you attempt to find any historical info on the York, it’s just not there, because for whatever weird reason no one cares to remember it. I’ve no idea when it was built, what it looked like before I started to catch films there, but it once served a community and aided businesses by sending forth reams of patrons hungry for food, drink, or just a walk around the residential streets that lay behind the south side of Eglington.
The last film I recall seeing there may have been Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (which classmate Drew snuck into after we all paid to see it. Weasel.). A current listing in Toronto Life pegs the York as being a “once dowdy movie theatre” with “grungy seats and popcorn crumbs.”
Piss off.
It was a bland, functional structure from the outside, and simple on the inside, but it wasn’t dowdy, the seats weren’t grungy, and during its heyday, it was a clean cinema that offered movies in premiere engagements in a wide film format that people remember with great fondness.
Just ask anyone who works at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and you’ll get a stark reality check that 2001: A Space Odyssey has done extremely well, making money, rekindling memories of what 70mm was like, and patrons telling some staffers to bring on more wide format classics. (Branagh's Hamlet, please.)
So as the York is slated for demolition and all physical traces will vanish, here’s a salute to what was a functionally grand movie-going experience. You got your money’s worth, and certainly after catching Gandhi, you left sated with good cinema.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Abandoned Matinees IV - The Allenby (Toronto)
This is the weirdo compromise that’s typical in Toronto: a façade or marquee is designated as historical, and it’s somehow retained while the rest of the building is altered for its new purpose.
On the one had, it can be regarded as a way for developers to weasel out of preserving the entire building, doing a kind of ‘There! See? We kept part of it out of respect! Now shut up let us run our business’ stance. At Danforth and Broadview sits a massive Shoppers Drug Mart, and if you look closely at the western edge, those arches are all that’s left of the original building – a funeral home.
Now, some may have been creeped out had the drug store been integrated into the original frame of a place where cadavers were tweaked and displayed and mourned before being boxed up or incinerated, but is there really any value in these token gestures at preservation?
Do the arches, or the Allenby’s marquee really make people stop and feel fuzzy that a piece of local history lives on, albeit repurposed? Would the current venues have been better served by simply starting from scratch and junking the old hulls and ornamentations in favour of a wholly new building that graphically tells people ‘Here is a gas Station. Fill up now!’?
Hard to tell, because while the Allenby looked like hell in its shuttered state from outside (see end of this page), it didn’t look that great in its final days either, spray-painted with movie iconography like the inside of someone’s van, as a poster commented on that site. (As is the case with many of these old ‘nabes, few historical photos exist of the building’s original exterior and interior layout during its heyday, except maybe this lobby shot, far down the page.)
The Allenby cinema boasted an early outfitting of optical Dolby sound and big screen picture, and yet, as happens to many neighbourhood venues, after its central attraction – the Rocky Horror Picture Show – withered from a major cult phenom into a fringe attraction, it closed.
The only amusement one can find in reading about a doomed theatre is some of the ideas that owners, consortiums, and preliminary buyers had for a building that once showed movies. Dance halls. Antique car showroom. Beer hall. Youth center. Mixed arts venue. Whatever. In T.O., some of the surviving cinema shells became carpet stores, dollar stores, book shops, computer surplus shops, while others were altogether demolished.
The question that runs through my mind is whether the Allenby could’ve succeeded as a rep cinema in light of the TIFF Bell Lightbox and Toronto Underground Cinema opening this year, as well as the re-opening of the Carlton. Single screen cinemas like the Bloor and the Royal survive, as well as the Revue, literally saved by the community.
I hope 5 years from now each and every one of the above (and those I missed in the above, hastily drawn tally) are still vibrantly alive, and have adapted through careful programming, local events, etc.
Maybe the ‘nabes will also serve as large venues for digital broadcasts of sports or arts events.
If it became the de facto standard to outfit a theatre with film and digital projection, as well as a 3D add-on, one would think networks and film distributors and studios might find the environment of a cinema could hold digital screenings of a huge diversity of programs.
I would’ve paid to see the finale of Lost in a cinema with digital sound and picture minus ad breaks, and maybe if the CBC’s plans to air hockey in 3D twice this season are still on the go, fans might consider going to cinemas for a HD-3D broadcast (minus the beer).
This is a travesty, whereas maintaining cinemas for some kind of public event isn’t. I’m glad the Eglington lives on, but it kills me that its original purpose will never happen again.
KQEK.com
Abandoned Matinees III - The Cinema Theater Varia (Belgium)
Forbidden Places has a great page on this Art Nouveau theatre that was built between 1910-1913, and has remained derelict since 1986. Efforts to restore this poured concrete edifice have apparently floundered, and it remains a home to pigeons.A photographer gained permission to enter the theatre with a video crew in 2004, but it’s his lovely photos that reveal the swerving lines, thin metal railings, narrow seating steps, and faint remnants of coloured walls and moldings that give a hint of this gem’s former décor.
The interior’s been stripped down to its concrete superstructure, but one can imagine it filled with nattily dressed patrons, either for a theatre show, or the movies, since it was also outfitted with an Italian projector.
To view the stills at Forbidden Places, click HERE. It’s also worth examining the video link on the page (French only), and reading some of the comments.
Further details of the interior – surviving wall colours, bathroom floor tiles, stairwells, light pools – are at Friched.net, taken in 2005, and there’s a shot stills montage on YouTube (archived also at http://www.photurbex.magix.net/), taken in 2010.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Abandoned Matinees II
This week’s Abandoned Matinees focuses on a pair of French photographers with a fascination for things once elegant, and now seemingly irreparably destroyed by the elements of water, apathy, and repurposing.In The Ruins of Detroit (announced for print, but excerpted online), photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Mefre showed the tarnished elegance of Detroit’s corporate and economic buildings from interior shots, but perhaps the most haunting were views of the active and populated sections of main streets through the blown-out windows of derelict towers, now giant works of architectural art that stand as ghosts - too solid to crumble into total ruin because they were built with far too much care. (A related piece on the photo-essay was published at Ruin with a View.)
Their more recent project covers former U.S. movie palaces, some of which have new lives as churches, furniture storage, or swap meet stands, while others appear as gems awaiting secondary lives as entertainment houses –places where the spirit of these buildings could would once again find joy in being appreciated by the people they were meant to serve.
Other buildings aren’t so lucky. Detroit’s United Artists Theater, for example, is a devastating example of horrific neglect; it’s as though its owners are stubbornly determined to let natural elements destroy the once-palatial theatre, but it just won’t freakin’ die.
The work of Marchand and Mefre is showcased via the New York Times (see “Tattered Palaces”) as well as their own website, and if that final image of the United Artist Theater interior leaves you with an intense desire to see more (oh, it’ll hurt…), you can find images of its current state at Flickr, courtesy of Alan Machielse, and SNWEB.ORG Photography (starting with rooftop views of Detroit before views of the building interiors).
And then there’s Forgotten Detroit, which offers a photo-essay on the theatre’s glory years, a detailed chronological essay at Buildings of Detroit, and the UA Theater’s MySpace and Facebook pages. Seriously.
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
Abandoned Matinees
When a movie theatre (or any performing arts house) has outlived its usefulness, or is abandoned and left to rot, or has been allowed to disintegrate by private or public city owners in order to justify the wrecker’s ball for the sake of public safety, it’s all just sad.Reading about a building’s glory years in print is rather dry, but there’s something impressionable in the still photos of a modern ruin taken by amateur historians, preservationists, photographers, urbanauts, or the curious.
There are a number of websites either dedicated to the state of forgotten buildings, or collections of stills in which the photographer has made a point in capturing the sadness, the mystique, and hypnotic decay of what was once a top-notch centre for artistic and commercial pleasure.
Think of your current favourite theatre… and now imagine the walk up the stairs towards the auditorium by flashlight… stepping around rubbish, plaster from crumbling walls, mold stains, a dead mouse, and piles of seats packed to one side, waiting for a scrap metal pickup that never happened.
Now the torn posters outside of the auditorium’s main doors… and then inside, where you see patches of rotting cloth seats… and a giant whole in the ceiling through which light, water, and pigeon dung have littered the torn red carpet and seats with crud.
The screen still looks good, and one side of the curtains hangs at the halfway point, as though the motor crapped out and no one bothered to finish the job in closing the curtains to signal the last show has long past.
This may be an irregular series for Sundays, or it may be regular, depending on how many collections of forgotten movie houses and drive-ins are out there in the internet’s ether, but for this starter, I’m picking the abandoned Loew’s Poli and Majestic Theatres in Bridgeport Connecticut.
There are several ways you can approach the entry into the past:
--- via the brief historical listing at Cinema Treasures, and a scanning of reader comments
--- pictures snapped by 826 Paranormal, and archived at Flickr.com
--- 826 Paranormal’s creepy YouTube video
--- or look for clips in the Steven Seagal actioner Pistol Whipped / The Marker (2008) and the upcoming Ryan Gosling / Kirsten Dunst film All Good Things
My suggestion is the photo galley, because its silence says a lot more about the glory that used to be, and leave Seagal until the very, very, very end, because, you know, it’s Girdle-Man doing his squintry-eye routine under a helmet of jet black hair that’s impervious to fire, water, and bolts of lightning.
Why do that to yourself?
Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com
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