In Hollywood, at the Polo Lounge over something called a McCarthy Salad (lettuce so finely chopped you could almost drink it with a straw, according to the NYTimes), disgruntled studio magnates bemoan the shrinking prospects of big studio movie-making. Grosses are in the tank, and Covid is only slightly to blame. 
 
“It’s over,” a glum film executive said at a holiday fete. TV won.”
 
Will there be movies or even, the subject of this blog, theaters? — in what we’re beginning to dream of as the “After” time? And wasn’t it all really slipping even before the Pandemic?
 
A friend sent me this tidbit:
The highest-grossing silent film of all time was an anti-war picture featuring the popular actor Rudolph Valentino in his first starring role; he would go on to be a superstar. The film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1916 bestselling novel of the same name. At the time, the film brought in $9.2 million in domestic sales, or about $381.1 million today.
 
Actually, it was the sixth highest-grossing silent, but who’s quibbling? The fact remains that it was big — as in “Boffo Socco,” a film that has “legs”— as Variety, which coined these aphorisms, might have said at the time.  
 
What’s happened to the movie business? Or you could simply do a fill-in-the-blank:  What’s happened to the book trade? to grocery stores? restaurants? 
 
More importantly, when Covid finally is as pervasive as the common cold, just an annoyance, what will happen if we all simply decide to stay home?   
 
People are quitting their jobs or failing to look for new ones in droves. Would Rudolf Valentino or Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford recognize the world we’re living in? Metropolis, a pre-cursor sci-fi of the twenties, fails entirely to anticipate what’s become of so-called civilization. 
 
Theaters — live or movie — at this juncture are hardly full of people. Will all the trouble we’ve gone to to preserve the great movie palaces (where Valentino made my mother, an early fan, swoon) be lost?
 
Since the silents started this rant, I’d like to dedicate the rest of this post to the rise of movie palaces in general. Here goes:
 
“The clouds that once floated over a thousand balconies have drifted away for good. The machines broke years ago. One by one the stars have blinked out, their tiny bulbs blackened... dead stars in the cold outer space of grimy atmospheric ceilings.” Ben M. Hall chose those sentences to end his memorable book about movie palaces, The Best Remaining Seats, evoking the darkened ceiling of an atmospheric theater (a palace whose very ceiling, in an electrified take on Trompe-l'œil, imitated the open sky). By 1961, when the book came out, palaces — atmospheric and otherwise — were going down fast. Only a year earlier, in 1960, Gloria Swanson had posed for Life in a sumptuous gown in the fresh ruins of New York’s most famous palace, the Roxy. Ms. Swanson had starred in The Love of Sunya, the silent that opened the Roxy in 1927. 
 
By 1976, when, with a group of friends, I tried my luck at running a (non-atmospheric but nonetheless exquisite) movie palace — the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, a 2672-seat Spanish Baroque confection) — hundreds more of the grand old houses were closing or about to close, losing their livelihoods, about to meet the Roxy’s fate.
 
1976-1979 could be said to be prime years of dereliction for movie palaces. Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and the Beverly in L.A. were both darkened in 1977; The Victory Theatre in Holyoke, Massachusetts went dark in 1979; The Albee in Cincinnati, my hometown, was demolished in 1977 to make way for a hotel; the Michigan Theatre in Detroit was converted to a three-level parking garage in that same year; and the list goes on. The Michigan is perhaps the most touching example of a fate worse than demolition — a French Renaissance dome that once sheltered 4,000 seats, given over to the protection of (what else in Detroit?) automobiles.  
 
There are several reasons why great single-screen theaters were particularly vulnerable in the mid-seventies. The country had been through a serious recession, and  whoever was arguably prosperous had moved to the suburbs. The knock-out punch TV delivered to movie attendance made selling thousands of tickets to a single screening almost impossible: theater operators fought back by building (mostly suburban) multiplexes.
 
Nobody went downtown anymore: derelict palaces in deserted urban settings made movie-going a lonely, even dangerous experience. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb.
 
Six years later at the St. George in Staten Island, a group of us struggled to sell enough tickets to fill at least half of our 2672 seats, despite fights that often broke out in the auditorium between neighborhood boys; one in particular featured broken beer  bottles. Another time there was a gun —but I will not elaborate just yet. You’ll read about it soon enough in the full book, Starts Wednesday, that will in due time follow this website.
 
Some twelve years later — 1988 — and eighteen years after the Bronx pipe bomb incident, a shootout between gang members at the aforementioned Loew’s Paradise — by then divided into four smaller theaters — resulted in an actual fatality. Such was the life in downtowns everywhere, and in the age of palace decline.
 
Despite thousands of wrecking-ball parties, there have been and continue to be notable victories in the saga of America’s most opulent movie theaters. I’d like to close with a tip of my former motion picture operator’s cap to the Palace Theater in Marion Ohio, saved from demolition by a local arts group in 1976, the very year so many other theaters went dark forever. I began with a description of a typical atmospheric, so it’s fitting that I should end with one. The Palace was one of the last such theaters to be built (1928, John Eberson) and is said to be one of 16 to survive today.
 
The week it opened, The Marion Star offered its readers a glimpse of what the new theater’s atmospheric dome might evoke, to a patron gazing up from one of the new plush seats:
“Allow your imagination to carry you to the gentle slope of a moon-lit Spanish hill...a vine covered garden wall, broken here and there with graceful arches. Through the archways spreads the soft light of a harvest moon, and the dim glow casts shadows over the somber colored walls. Overhead myriads of stars [electric light was still a miracle in 1928!] are twinkling in an azure blue sky, and soft, fleecy clouds are drifting gently...”
 
BTW, clouds “drifted” thanks to a series of mechanically-synchronized slide projectors or “cloud machine” hidden in the recesses of a theater’s dome.
 
Ben M. Hall, who passed suddenly and violently in the rough-edged 1970‘s, might have taken solace in knowing how many grand movie theaters, atmospheric and otherwise, have survived. The preservation and/or resurrection of so many palaces proves how important they ultimately were, and are, to their communities, thousands still standing as arts and community  centers, churches, live theaters, and yes, Marion proves it — as movie houses.

Film — the real thing, with sprocket holes, that runs through a projector — is rare these days, but in 1976, when we ran a 2,672-seat movie palace, the St. George Theatre in Staten Island, it was plentiful and thankfully not explosive. This didn’t keep the fire inspectors from fining us if fire buckets in the projection booth weren’t precisely 12 inches off the floor, a regulation that dated back to the bad old days of nitrate film. Almost all movies, certainly major motion pictures, were on a nitrate base before the late forties and certainly after 1952, when Kodak finally stopped making the volatile stuff, and switched entirely to a variation of acetate, the base they’d been using all along for home movies. In the heyday of the movie palaces, going to the movies, let alone working as a projectionist, were risky activities. Theater fires as dramatic as the one depicted in Cinema Paradiso were, before 1952, common, if not somehow likely. 

How likely? A 1936 issue of International Projectionist estimated that one American projectionist died, on average, every 18 days, probably not of a heart attack. Nitrate often simply exploded. And get this: while projectors were carbon arc (which we still had at the St. George in seventy-six), nitrate film, whose base is essentially a solid form of nitroglycerin, had all the aspects of a bomb (fire, volatile material). 

The very existence of  projection booths in theaters had been established early in the silent era, largely as a safety feature, an attempt to contain anticipated fire. Should a fire begin in the booth, the wax that lined the projection ports — if not a fuse of some sort — melted, and flame-proof shutters sealed the booth from the theater, like a tomb, which, as a matter of fact, it might become. Case in point, the June 1947 issue of the aforementioned International Projectionist eulogizes a fifteen-year-old — presumably breaking into the craft of projection — Marion Shea, who lost his life in a theater fire.
 
What is it, or was it, about nitrate film stock? A US Navy instructional movie about the safe handling of celluloid/nitrate film includes footage of a full reel of the stuff burning underwater. Water, in fact, is the worst thing you can add to a nitrate fire: it only encourages dangerous gases!

Beginning in the thirties, the fact that practically the whole history of movies as an art form was laid down on unreliable stock that might explode spontaneously, meant that a number of archives were destroyed on hot summer days, in storage vaults that lacked ventilation. Everything Fox ever made before 1937 went up in an archive fire that year, requiring seven fire companies to extinguish.
A similar calamity happened to MGM’s archives in 1965. 
 
We hardly show movies on nitrate anymore, except in rare circumstances, which still doesn’t solve the problem of preservation of rare reels, because, over time, in the presence of the kind of heat you experience in a hot car in a parking lot in July, these films will either explode or bubble and degenerate. 

This leads me to the anecdote that started off this post. My friend, Robert Endres, now retired from his long-time job as Chief Projectionist at Radio City Music Hall, reminisced recently about his attempts to save some archival footage of the Center Theatre’s opening. The Music Hall had, in those days, vaults for the storage of nitrate film, and Bob was trying to get the fragile newsreels converted to acetate before they disintegrated altogether.

One of my great regrets was that I couldn’t save newsreel footage of the opening of the Center Theatre. There’s very little documentation about it, and I had the footage in our vault.  It was nitrate and when I opened the can I noted that it had started to bubble. Our Chief Operating Officer suggested taking it to Technicolor and having the Lab director take a look at it. I did. When I walked into his office, he closed the blinds over the inside window. He opened the can, took one look, and said, “Get it out of here!”  I said, “Can’t you do something?” and he repeated, “Get it out of here!”  I picked the can up and put it under my left arm and he said, “No, put it under your right arm. That way if it blows up it only takes a lung and not your heart.” Needless to say, I took it back to the Hall very gingerly!

I couldn’t resist asking  Bob what happened after that...to which he replied,

I held the can out at arm’s length most of the way back. I took the subway and I’m sure violated a number of rules of the Fire Department and the MTA in doing so, although they probably wouldn’t have known about the hazard of nitrate film by that time.

Nitrate film seems to be a perpetual hot potato. Michael Zahs’ collection of early Miele films, which he kept in a shed on his Iowa property for many years, were nitrate; this didn’t keep him from mailing a number of them to the Library of Congress, which duplicated them and mailed them back! 
You might be wondering why, if Kodak had acetate as far back as 1909, which it happily sold to amateur filmmakers, it kept producing nitrate materials to sell to the studios? The myth surrounding nitrate’s beauty, the dense blacks and luminous whites, is probably the answer. To which I say, what price beauty?

Afterthoughts:
Here are a few more hot potato anecdotes from Bob Endres, and one other afterthought besides;
Bob’s comments:

1. We actually had a nitrate film vault at the Hall complete with two sets of doors. My boss discovered that it wasn’t cooled in the summer and had some of the film brought down to my office in the booth. Since you’re not supposed to have more than a few thousand feet of film outside of a fireproof container at one time, this startled the city inspectors when they came to check the booth, particularly since one of the cans on top had a big red label saying “Nitrate” on it. There was quite a bit of nitrate footage stored in the nitrate vault still, when I started there. Our Head of House Operations knew about it and when he saw Towering Inferno he said we should get  it out of the building. 

2. I...didn’t want to destroy the documentary footage that we had on the history of the Hall. Since it was operated by RKO, there were a lot of RKO newsreels that contained Radio City stories.  We also had a “March of Time” episode that featured the Hall. I made a deal with MOMA [Museum of Modern Art] that they could have the footage if they would pull acetate prints for me, thus enabling me to show footage that I didn’t want to take a chance with when it was on nitrate. A stagehand and I filled a shopping cart with reels of nitrate film and wheeled it up 6th Avenue to MOMA.

3. We did a tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall with a film retrospective. I got a call from an editor wanting to know if we would run a clip on nitrate film. When the editor said she would take the clip out of the 2000’ reel in was contained in, I said O.K.  She brought the three-minute roll to New York in her purse on a plane.

Final note: Acetate is no optimal medium either, not volatile like nitrate, but imminently perishable.
​Check out “vinegar syndrome.”

12/29/2021
Traditionally, to mark the New Year, I run this reminiscence written by an original St. George Theatre staffer, Paul Plonski, of closing down before midnight, forty-five years ago. So much has happened in the previous year — a world plunged into darkness — that this memory of New York Harbor at midnight can’t entirely dismiss. Still, it’s good to remember that darkness and light are meant for each other! Here’s to 2022; may it be everything 2020 and 2021 failed to be...

Below you’ll hear first from me and Dean, my husband and partner in the theater. 

Then Paulie, as we called him back then, will step up with his reminiscence: 

(Me and Dean) The movie had just gone off-screen at the St. George Theatre, our 2,672-seat movie palace in Staten Island. Gabe, our grizzled projectionist (returned to the fold after being disciplined by his union for TV watching in the booth) wanted to get on our good side. His shift over, he strode to the concession stand and slapped down on the glass display case a rather ordinary box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies.

“Happy New Year!” He smiled at me, that crooked tobacco-stained grin of his. “These are for you and Dean. Yeah, yeah, I meant to give’m to you at Christmas, but I forgot...” Who says re-gifting is a recent phenomenon? He buttoned his peacoat and made for the street, his brief foray into sociability accomplished.
​
Paulie, who had the concession shift that night, was just shutting things down, counting change, locking the case. He pointed a pretend revolver at the back of the retreating projectionist, and fired a phantom bullet. I laughed, Dean patted Paulie on the back. Everybody knew Gabe’s hourly pay was $14.76. By comparison Paulie was making minimum wage, $2.30 an hour. Rich as Gabe was, the Entenmann’s seemed as puny as the gesture that had produced it. We hadn’t paid ourselves in months, and he probably knew it. Dean stepped into the stand and grabbed Paulie’s Windex and rag.
“It’s almost midnight, and I imagine you’ve got other plans,” he told the kid, fourteen years his junior.
Thirty-eight years later, thanks to the internet, Paulie, in his fifties (these days an aeronautical engineer), found me via this website. We’re reacquainted as full adults since then, and I’m happy to say that his memory of that particular New Year’s Eve has become a traditional post for SW.
On that preternaturally cold night, we darkened the house, closed down the box office, locked the concession stand, threw the giant breakers to power down the marquee, and bolted the glass doors. We wished whoever remained good luck in the coming new year, 1977. Paulie jumped into his car, parked just below the marquee, and a few of us “management” folk straggled up the hill towards home and some eggnog I had ready. But Paulie’s night would be a little different:

​(Here’s Paulie)

You and Dean had made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time.

My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So...at midnight I was still on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.

[It was around 15 degrees F that night, with wind gusts off the harbor of up to 25 mph; in fact, New Year’s Eve in NYC, ’76 is tied with ’96 for the fifth coldest Dec 31st in recorded weather history].

Quiet, except for the wind. Then at the stroke of midnight, the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to cherish forever. PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed).

Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter; we’d be out, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks, a lit spark I try to keep going, in these blog posts.

Thanks again, Paulie...and Happy New Year.

Peace to everyone... And in the coming year don’t forget to like us on FB, and don’t be shy about comments...and, if you can, find a way to support theaters and the arts in these more-than-difficult times, until the world as we knew it comes back again, please do.

Last year I see that I offered up a found poem, so I offer it again...I wrote it  forty-five years ago, before I became a poet/writer.  Found it in a box of journal entries rescued from the garage...

At the Box Office
Selling tickets last night
I got into a conversation with a drunk
who said, “Selling tickets must be pretty dull,”
and I said,
“I meet some pretty interesting people.”
He said, “You don’t talk to them though,
just sell’m tickets,
but wait a minute — you’re talking to me.”
I said, “Someday I may write a book about this place
and you may be in it.”
He said, “Be sure you spell my name right,”
I said, “If you’re in my book you won’t be yourself     exactly.”
            He said, “Like a myth?”

Afterthoughts:
It’s amazing to me that I knew in 1976 what I was going to do. Wonder if the drunk is still alive? Despite his state, or maybe because of it, he understood, somehow, what a myth really is!

Nostalgia is either a cheap thrill — in which case it’s fake nostalgia — or real and deeply affecting, as in the moment, when, as a three-year-old, I crawled under the family Christmas tree — adrift as it was in satin beribboned gifts — and unwrapped every single one, even Grampa’s can of pipe tobacco. I spent, or so the older folks reminded me for years, the rest of Christmas in disgrace; but I don’t remember that, or any remorse. The gleaming and entirely vivid moment of original Christmas discovery is all that remains for me, and the glee of tearing all that wrapping paper. Nostalgia is an oddball kind of thing, if it’s real. You can be nostalgic for things you never much liked or hardly ever tried, if they happen to remind you of some other transport.
 
How is it, for example, that I’m nostalgic about smoking? But for one brief puff of a Marlboro on the playground, (followed by a gritty spate of coughing), I barely smoked a cigarette in my life. Well I was a passive smoker; anybody who survived the fifties, sixties and seventies inhaled plenty of secondhand smoke. With the exception of primary and secondary school classrooms and cafeterias, there was virtually no place in 1950’s America where smoking didn’t happen. It prevailed at home (Mom and Pop and all their friends), on TV (think Ernie Kovacs on What’s My Line?), on buses, in lobbies, at restaurants, in (yes!) hospitals, on airplanes (cigarettes were passed out for free) and certainly beneath the copious dome of your favorite movie palace, its chandelier dimly visible through the haze. The presence of a dome made movie palaces particularly smoke-friendly. 
 
By the time (April, 1976) a group of young entrepreneurs — of which I was one — took over the lease of the St. George Theatre, an aging 2,672-seat movie palace, the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health was twelve years old, and new research in the early seventies was pointing a finger at second-hand smoke. Some people were choosing not to be smokers, and those people didn’t want to sit next to people who were.
 
We never sold cigarettes at the St. George, but you can be assured a ciggie machine had graced the theater’s lobby before we came along. There’s something else to be nostalgic for: putting a quarter into the cigarette machine for your daddy, then pushing the button under “Parliament” and hearing the thunk as a pack of cigarettes (and often as not matches) slid down into the tray. Talk about nostalgia; how about that thunk?
 
But getting back to the St. George in 1976, a lesson about the all-pervasiveness of cigarette smoking over time was waiting in the lobby for us to discover.
 
By the time we took over, the lobby chandeliers hung like dark armored shapes above the corridor, each ringed by a set of (burned out) electric candles. Late in our first month, a hard-working member of our team figured out how to crank the chandeliers down for bulbing. Voila! What I’d assumed all along were plates of copper sheeting at the center of each chandelier were actually panes of colored glass, revealing more electric candles inside. Over the period of a very long night, this comrade scrubbed patiently, dipping the glass panels in a solution of ammonia and soap, and, by daybreak, transforming them from opaque seemingly faux-copper to fully-transparent glass. What had hidden their beauty? Forty-plus years of cigarette smoke! Standing beneath their now blinding light, I wondered what the insides of the lungs of all those smokers looked like.
 
Smoking in theaters was still permitted, but most operators relegated that activity to one or another area. Since, due to scant audiences, the balcony was generally not open, we chose the left-hand side of the orchestra as our smoking section, then struggled to keep smokers corralled there. A number strayed into the general audience when nobody was looking, especially if the smoking section was full, but most stayed put, their smoke trailing upwards beyond the lip of the mezzanine.
 
Now here’s the core of my nostalgia: before the smoke reached those exulted heights, it passed through the beam of the projector in rich eddies, morphing into a kind of transparent marble.
 
How could anything so lethal be so beautiful? I remember my daddy’s cigarette smoke the same way: he knew just how to blow smoke-rings. Seated on his lap, I could poke my finger through them! Daddy! He was so Bogie...
 
Speaking of Bogart, the movies themselves were one reason almost every adult smoked in the nineteen fifties. Before I wax rhapsodic on the glamor of filmic smoking, let’s cut the nostalgia by reminding ourselves that style frequently boils down to economics. “The link between Hollywood and tobacco goes back to the beginning of talking pictures,” Stanton Glantz (Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the University of California, San Francisco) reminds us. “It was a way to thoroughly embed tobacco use in the social fabric.”
 
Bogie in To Have and Have Not smoked Chesterfields. What could be sexier? Clark Gable, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis and Spencer Tracey all smoked “Luckies” (Lucky Strikes) when they smoked on screen, openly promoting them in print media and on radio. Product placement was still invisible then; the stars were gods. 
 
Even to those of us who never lit up, smoking was sexy. There they were, movie stars, inhabiting their universe of the giant screen, enveloped in movie smoke, and just below, mere mortals (my parents, other adults, rebellious teens) knocked an ash off a genuine cigarette, sending the smoke of their peculiar incense up to the theater’s dome, by way of the film’s radiant beam.
 
Afterthoughts:
1. Weed. Of course, there was no designated smoking section at the St. George Theatre for the hand-rolled smokes of my generation. We all toked — me only occasionally, because, despite the mental payoff, holding smoke in my throat just hurt too much. But, especially for midnight shows, grass was ever-present, making its benign path through the bright beam of Woodstock or a Ken Russell extravaganza, all the while spreading good cheer, smelling vaguely like oregano, and blessedly lighting a fire under candy and popcorn sales.
 
2. Well, in a way I did smoke, way back in the fifties and early sixties, if you count candy cigarettes! My brand was Lucky Strikes.

It all started on December 21, 1933, the year after the Music Hall opened. That first Christmas Show was accompanied by the movie Flying Down to Rio (strange choice, perhaps) and The Night Before Christmas, a Walt Disney Silly Symphony — an animated short film. The show, created by the Music Hall's stage producer Leon Leonidoff and none other than Vincente Minnelli, (then Radio City’s music director) lasted just two weeks.
 
Fast forward to the 1970‘s: the nearly six-thousand-seat Radio City was still showing movies and presenting a stage show, but drawing scant audiences, something I failed to notice that year, busy as I was, running a movie palace of my own. (Well, not my own, because I didn’t own it, just the right to go broke paying its rent). That would be the St. George Theater, a 2,672-seat hall in Staten Island, seventy blocks south of Radio City and a ferry-ride away. We had no Christmas Show at the St. George in 1976, just a four-wall “deal” involving a little-known movie called In Search of Noah’s Ark, which purported to prove that pieces of Noah’s original ark had been found on Mt. Ararat. Well, it was a living, at least for that month, and because it was a four-wall, we didn’t have to do anything but turn the theater over to  Sun Pictures, and pop some popcorn. Towards the end of the Noah’s Ark run, we managed to get a local teen escape artist/magician onstage between showings, to take the chill off.  
 
As a result of running the St. George, I met Robert Endres, then the head projectionist at Radio City and, the following year, got a private tour of our big sister theater, including a private showing of some or other forgettable movie (Pete’s Dragon?) and a rehearsal of the Rockettes. A private showing in a nearly six-thousand-seat hall really is a little unnerving.... By that time, I was an ex-movie theater operator, and could see just how much trouble big theaters were in everywhere. There was talk, that year and the year after, of the demise of Radio City, the last of the Manhattan behemoth palaces; which brings us to January 1978, when the end nearly did come for the music hall. 
 
“Nostalgia Draws Music Hall Crowds, Despite Cold”
 
The headline could have come out of yesterday’s New York Times, but it didn’t. The date at the top of the column is January 8, 1978. Radio City, Roxy Rothafel’s great gold Deco clamshell of a theatre, occupying — since 1932 — several thousand square feet of prime NYC real estate, about a half-block of Midtown between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was in trouble. Everybody knew about it; 5,690 mostly-vacant seats in Midtown? "Vacant" anything is a no-go in Manhattan. Management promised to keep the doors open till Easter. Then the Rockettes — once upon a time Russell Markert's Music Hall Roxyettes — and the whole shebang would be gone. Folks from as far away as Minnesota braved the frostbite of forty-one years ago, in lines four deep around the corner, compelled by the notion that the Music Hall was going the way of so many palaces. It had been “curtains” (pun intended) for the Roxy, Radio City's sister theater only a few blocks farther downtown (demolished in 1960) and on the other coast, for the 3,387-seat Paramount (aka Graumann’s Metropolitan) in L.A. (torn down in 1961), just to name two spectacular demolitions. By 1978,  it seemed there might be more movie palaces down than standing.
 
I’d read the headlines too, and had felt the despair. I was still grappling with my own severe depression: less than a year before, my team had crash-landed, after trying and failing to keep the St. George open as a movie palace. The year after our failure, my old favorite hometown palace, the RKO Albee, had finally been reduced to a pile of marble and plaster dust in Cincinnati, despite a vigilant Save the Albee committee. My friend and colleague, Robert Endres, then still head projectionist at RCMH, recalls the shock of hearing that Radio City would close:
 
I guess you could say I was ‘stunned’ at the closing announcement as was everyone else. I had been out in Illinois with my parents over the Christmas holiday.... I walked into work that first day back to be told there was a meeting in the large rehearsal hall and we were told to attend. When I got there the Music Hall executive staff was there, as was Marshall [president of Rockefeller Center] who made the announcement. The mood was pretty grim.
           
It was a time, the late seventies, when hardly anybody could see far enough into the future to imagine how the great halls could ever be useful again. Across America, in most cities, suburbanites hardly ever went “downtown” anymore: derelict palaces in badly-lit urban settings made downtown movie-going seem a lonely, even dangerous experience. Even inside the theaters, there were incidents. In May, 1970, at Loew’s Paradise, once the “showplace of the Bronx,” members of an audience watching The Liberation of L.B. Jones, accustomed as they were to small explosions, refused to leave the theater after a pipe-bomb went off in the orchestra pit. Business-as-usual. Police forcibly evacuated the palace, where they found another unexploded bomb. Such was the life of the urban movie-goer — and exhibitor.
 
The Music Hall had an entirely different problem. Manhattan is the ultimate “downtown,“ so even in the dire seventies, there were plenty of people on Midtown streets, and the Music Hall was certainly safe, if hardly populated. But with nearly six thousand seats, a dwindling NYC tourism couldn’t begin to support Radio City; and New Yorkers didn’t think of the Music Hall as a place to go for movies. To quote New York on the subject of moviegoing in 1978, “ You consulted one of the foldout sheets everyone had tacked above their desks or in their kitchen, from the revival houses, blessed be their names—the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Regency, Theatre 80 Saint Marks, the Bleecker Street Cinema.” These were the theaters of the day. Ironically, it’s these very art houses that are mostly gone now, while among other refurbished movie palaces, Radio City stands. 
 
It was — who else? — the Rockettes who finally saved Radio City. Two days after Alton Marshall made the announcement that the theater’s last day would be April 12, Rosemary Novellino, the dance captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company and Eileen Collins, the Rockettes' union rep, founded The Showpeople’s Committee To Save Radio City Music Hall, with the Rockettes at the movement’s core.
 
While all those patrons were standing in lines four deep on the cold pavement, Rockettes were entertaining them! The committee, meanwhile, launched its letter-writing campaign gathering better than 150,000 signatures worldwide, an impressive feat pre-internet. This and a number of efforts at publicity — including some guerrilla theater, in which committee members gathered signatures while dressed in suits of armor (to highlight their “war” to save the Music Hall) — could not be ignored by New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the morning of March 14, the day of Radio City’s Commission hearing, the committee organized an “impromptu” Rockette kick line on the steps of City Hall. 
 
Two weeks later on March 28, the Music Hall's interior was declared a landmark, and not a moment too soon, given Marshall's deadline. Six weeks after that, on May 12, 1978, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. 
 
A little more than forty years after the Rockettes danced in the cold — for all those people who assumed they were getting a last look at Radio City — the hall is still standing, a live house featuring occasional film.  
 
As are many grand theaters across America, including my own St. George. Despite our failure to keep it alive as a movie house in 1976, and a number of failed subsequent efforts by entrepreneurs at repurposing the St. George (roller rink, dinner theater, antiques venue), it’s alive and kicking; and I mean that literally, with a children’s corps of dancers onstage many afternoons. This story can be had via the recent PBS Documentary, Treasures of New York: St. George Theatre starring our theater’s eventual savior, Rosemary Cappozalo, and her family. Rosemary, or "Mrs. Rosemary," as she's known in Staten Island, was a Julliard-trained dancer and veteran teacher herself. What is it about dancers? In the cold, on the sidewalk, or in a deserted theater, they just keep moving!
 
Afterthoughts:  
1. The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York City would never have existed if the city hadn’t demolished one of its most glorious buildings, the old Penn Station, and felt a great deal of remorse about that fact, passing the Landmarks Law in 1965. So without the loss of that fine Beaux Arts transportation hub, Radio City Music Hall (and a number of other buildings, including Grand Central and large parts of the Broadway Theater District) might never have been spared.
 
2. Something anecdotal: a story in my husband’s family involves a friend of his father’s, a WWII G.I. who was in the vanguard of American troops that liberated Paris in 1944. Story goes, he was riding on a tank in the liberation parade when a woman tossed him some flowers, exclaiming, “Vive les americaines!” In return, the soldier shouted, in his best high school French, “Vive la Arc de Triomphe.” Determined to have the last salute, the smiling woman sang out, “...et vive la Radio City Music Hall!”
 
3. Bob  Endres (formerly of RCMH) gets the last say:  “I heard one interesting story from a former vice president who, after he retired, had lunch with Alton Marshall...President of Rock Center. Marshall apparently told him that they really didn't want to close the Hall, but...had to do something about the format, so they put the story out that they were going to close...to get enough attention to be able to restructure...”  

4. An earlier version of this post ran several years ago, and here’s what a few folks had to say in the “Comments” section:  
Honestly So many did everything they could to “save the Music Hall” as a formerRockette and Alumnae member I could not fathom the loss of My Home Away From Home. After the fact I did learn that Bob Enders comment was the true one , Nonetheless less I’m just happy The Radio City Music Hall is still your fav place to go. Linda Lynch  / 12/28/2018 / 11:06:25 am
 
It is no small miracle that the hall is standing on all that prime Manhattan real estate....
vh 12/31/2018 / 09:46:03 am
 
This just in from our friend, Robert Endres, former chief projectionist at RCMU:
You mentioned the Roxy being close to Radio City — actually there were two Roxy’s within one block of the Hall. The original Roxy was just exactly one block west of the Hall, and the “New Roxy” was one block south, for a time they were both in operation at the same time as the Hall. The Hall and the New Roxy were asymmetrical on 6th Ave with the RCA building in between them. The “New” Roxy didn’t last long, as the “old” Roxy sued Roxy over the use of his name, and the theatre became the Center Theatre.

On the wall above the baby grand piano in my Great Aunt Lottie’s living room, which I visited as a little girl, a Maxfield Parrish print offered a moment of reverie. It’s a well-known illustration, widely available as a print. It reveals a boy swinging on a swing. He isn’t the kind of kid you’d see down at the park, but ethereal, a spirit of some sort, nearly naked, his head thrown back in ecstasy. In the background is a fairy castle. 
 
It’s that castle I think about these days, when I revisit, in memory, the St. George Theatre, a 2,672-seat movie palace I struggled to keep afloat in 1976 with a group of like-minded idealists. At that point, I was little more than a decade older than the mythical boy on the swing, which, in my mind, gives our daring and doomed venture of movie palace management the (autumnal) burnt orange hues of the Parrish print.
 
I suppose the reason I’ve conflated movie palaces like the St. George (still standing), with a mythical castle is that the whole experience of movie-going seems, after these two long years of pandemic, far away, if a bit fantastical. Even a trip to the local UA multiplex or the Angelica in Manhattan is, well, a less-likely journey than it might have been two years ago. To sit in the dark with strangers for several hours is, face it, a pretty daring thing to do at this moment. White men from 25 to 45 seem to be the only people doing it with any regularity. Women are, by nature, more health-aware, which may be why their movie-going numbers are down.
 
Then there is the big question: Are we (us, you know, Americans) drawing away from each other in some general sense? We do seem less inclined to mingle with un-like-minded people. I don’t want this to happen! I don’t want to be one of the last people around to recall happy communal experiences. 
 
And there's the fact that streaming sucks! When was the last time you had to provide a password and user ID (which you forgot) to watch a movie in a theater? Or how recently did the spinning wheel (a friend calls it the “wheel of death”) promise but never delivered the entertainment you were primed for? Or the stream was just plain oversubscribed? 
 
Never mind screen size (though I mind it a lot, especially when it affects a movie with a big landscape like Nomadland. And while we’re at it, what’s the difference between a first-rate movie and binge-watching Succession?
 
One of my favorite bedtime adventures is, actually, an episode of What’s My Line from 1963 or ‘64. Dorothy Kilgallen and crew can tell you every movie that’s opening on Broadway that long-ago week, which is how they often as not guess the identity of the “mystery guest.”  There’s nostalgia for you! — for the movies, as filtered (ironically) through network television — which took a crack at finishing movie-going off, before being itself destroyed by cable. The tech fishes all eating each other in succession: interesting, but let’s grab hold of the bigger picture, the one on the wide screen. Let’s just not lose the habit of sitting down together in the dark with strangers.