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Topic: Loew's Paradise Reopens in Bronx As Grand Concert Hall

Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 10-22-2005 12:41 PM

This grand old movie palace has died several times, only to be restored "in nearly all its grandeur." It reopens next Saturday,
October 29th, 2005.

It opened the year of my birth, at the commencement of the Great Depression. I've worked it many times in its sad state as a quartet, and hoped someone could save it.

Long link

In Nearly All Its Grandeur, Paradise Reopens in Bronx

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: October 22, 2005, The New York Times

Stars will not be twinkling in an enchanted nighttime sky, and goldfish will not be gliding through the fountain, but otherwise Paradise - or at least the Bronx version of it - is about to be regained.

[Photo
Librado Romero/The New York Times]
Almost 4,000 burgundy seats have been installed, and the famed midnight-blue ceiling has been repainted.

[Photo
Librado Romero/The New York Times]
One of several murals visible on entering the lobby of the Loew's Paradise on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
The Loew's Paradise, a 76-year-old movie palace that gave generations of working-class strivers a taste of Old World opulence and gave generations of teenagers a haunting setting for the taste of their first kiss, is scheduled to reopen next Saturday after more than 30 years of either being boarded up or sliced up into multiple screens.

The new owner of what was once the Bronx equivalent of Radio City Music Hall has restored much of its Italian baroque grandeur. Since putting up $4.5 million to acquire the theater two years ago, the owner, Gerald Lieblich, has gotten workers to clean the cherubs, caryatids, recumbent lions, gargoyles and other statuary in the vaulted lobby and gargantuan auditorium, install almost 4,000 burgundy seats and repaint the famed midnight-blue ceiling.

Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, called the reopening "the resurrection of one of the most spectacular movie palaces ever built."

"It was the showplace of the Bronx," he said. "It was meant to take people out of their humdrum existence and bring them into a world of unimagined wealth and luxury."

The Paradise will not reopen as a movie house, however. Its opening night performance is a salsa and merengue concert, clearly a bid to cater to a borough where Latinos now make up half the populace. The entrepreneurs leasing the space also plan to hold gospel, rhythm and blues and comedy acts, live boxing matches, closed-circuit sports events, beauty pageants and nostalgia acts that might appeal to onetime Bronx residents.

The entrepreneurs also plan to use the giant auditorium once more for high school graduations, and to rent out the ornate lobby and mezzanine for weddings and bar mitzvahs, perhaps even for the grandchildren of those who remember first seeing "Singin' in the Rain" or "Jailhouse Rock" at the Paradise.

However the theater is used, the reopening of the 45,000-square-foot building is another milestone in the gathering renaissance of a borough that two decades ago was known for its landscape of eviscerated buildings and Fort Apache air of menace. Indeed, the once-princely boulevard it sits on, the 99-year-old Grand Concourse, is itself being spruced up. The refurbished Loew's Paradise is likely to dazzle a different generation of strivers and their children just as it dazzled one resident, Diane Levine Edelstein, when she was a teenager almost a half-century ago.

"You walked in and you felt you were in another world, you weren't in a movie theater," said Ms. Edelstein, now a senior research assistant at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "We always sat in the balcony because you felt closer to heaven. I remember watching the stars and not looking at the movie."

Others remembered its balcony as something of a lovers' lane. "I remember going to the Paradise in the late 1950's when they were showing 'The Ten Commandments,' and the couple to my right was breaking nine of them," said Stephen M. Samtur, co-publisher of Back in the Bronx magazine, a nostalgic quarterly.

Phyllis Gross Greenbaum, now a publisher of community newspapers in the Washington-Baltimore area, suggested that the Paradise stunned her and her friends because "I don't think many of us grew up with that kind of elegance."

The Paradise, whose five-story facade has been declared a city landmark, opened in 1929, six weeks before the stock market crashed, with a showing of the "all-talking" film, "The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu," starring Warner Oland. Its architect was John Eberson, an Austrian immigrant who began his career designing opera houses and went on to create dozens of what were known as "atmospheric" theaters, including five "Wonder Theaters" for the Loew's national chain in the New York area.

The Paradise's atmospheric show included twinkling stars, rolling clouds and flying pigeons. The stage was surrounded by sculptured walls with flowing vines, cypress trees and shrubs and classical statues everywhere. In three domes set into the lobby's filigreed ceiling, Eberson had painters execute dreamy murals of ersatz half-nude deities: Sound, Story and Film.

The grand lobby was surrounded by fluted and gilded mahogany pillars and, at mezzanine level, an arched balustrade of royal proportions. On the lobby's north wall Eberson placed a Carrara marble fountain of a child on a dolphin. (The fountain's pool, which once held the goldfish, will not be replaced because it would interfere with a new concessions stand.) For the cream-toned terra cotta and marble facade, Eberson designed a mechanical clock topped by St. George astride a charger slaying a fire-breathing dragon every time the clock struck the hour. The theater cost $4 million to build.

[Photo
Librado Romero/The New York Times]
Gerald Lieblich spent $4.5 million to acquire the Paradise in 2003.
Over the years, the fountain stopped bubbling, the clock stopped working and St. George vanished around 1970, somehow lowered five stories onto a busy thoroughfare. As television made it difficult to fill the theater's seats and middle-class audiences moved to the suburbs, the Paradise was divided up, first as a twin around 1973 and then in the early 1980's as a quadriplex, which it remained until 1994, when, severely run-down, it closed for good.

At least one effort to resurrect it collapsed, with $1 million alone spent on gilding. But in 2003, the Paradise was taken over by Mr. Lieblich, a 44-year-old developer of small commercial buildings.

"For the last 20 years that I've been in the Bronx, it's been better and better, and in the theater I saw an eyesore that needed to be brought back as the crown jewel," Mr. Lieblich said.

With workmen still vacuuming the auditorium, Mr. Lieblich showed a reporter around, highlighting the new air-conditioning, the repointing of the facade, the replacement of reddish neons in the marquee and the replication of the original oval ticket booth. Getting the lights to twinkle again, he said, proved uneconomical. He declined to say how much he had spent.

One of the keys to making the project profitable, he said, is renting the 30,000 square feet of commercial space that is part of the theater building to a significant retailer. One has not been secured yet. A major retailer would be a step up from the shops flanking the theater to the north, a 99-cents store and one that sells furniture on credit.

The opening-night concert is an only-in-New York production. The impresarios leasing the theater are Gabriel Boter, 58, who immigrated from the former Soviet state of Georgia in 1979, and his son Richard, 30, a nonpracticing lawyer who is married to a Dominican and is fluent in Spanish. Father and son expect to schedule 35 concerts a year and 10 boxing matches, though they do not have any longtime experience in organizing events.

There are three firm bookings after opening night, including a concert sponsored by WQHT-FM 97.1 "Hot 97" and a Latina beauty contest.

"There is a strong personal attachment I found people have to the Paradise," the younger Mr. Boter said. "That gives me a strong sense of personal responsibility to make sure that it will have the splendor and be the jewel it once was."

[ 10-23-2005, 12:21 PM: Message edited by: Gerard S. Cohen ]