Midtown Theater ARCHITECT: Boak & Paris DATE: 1932 STYLE: Art Deco The Midtown Theater (now Metro Theater), a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater, has one of the finest facades of its type in New York City. Among the Art Deco buildings in New York City, many of the most notable are skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings, but small buildings including banks, stores, and some theaters were also constructed in this style. The Midtown was designed and built in 1932-33 by Boak & Paris, an architectural firm involved mainly with the construction of apartment houses in the 1920s and 30s. The theater is distinguished by a glazed terra-cotta facade, executed in various colors, predominantly beige and black. A central medallion features bas-relief stylized figures holding theatrical masks representing comedy and tragedy, symbolic of the use of the building as a theater. Constructed during the Depression, when small neighborhood theaters were built instead of the popular large movie palaces of the 1920s, the Midtown is one of the few functioning Pre-World War II movie theaters of the many which once lined Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

The Metro Theater (formerly Midtown Theatre), ca. 1994. This landmarked, Depression-era theater has since closed, and, as of March, 2016, is slated for retail conversion. The Midtown Theater was completed in 1933, replacing the seven-story tenement building which had occupied its site. Described by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as “a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater” with “one of the finest facades of its type in New York City,” it recalls a specific era of theater construction, when 1930s austerity led developers to eschew the grand theater architecture of the previous decades. In Edmund Vincent Gillon’s 1994 photo, the marquee advertises showings of “The Client,” a legal drama starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, and Brad Renfro.

The Midtown Theatre, 1933. The Marquee advertises “Double Harness,” a 1933 film starring Ann Harding and William Howell.