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City: Time to make Loew’s fit for Kings
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del.icio.usCity officials have raised the curtain on their latest effort to save the Loew’s Kings Theater — the historic-but-decaying movie palace where Barbra Streisand once ushered.
After years of takes that ended up on the cutting-room floor, the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which owns the theater, put out a casting call last week for a developer to buy the aging starlet and restore it to a working resource for the diverse community in the heart of Flatbush.
“The theater must be restored and preserved,” said Borough President Markowitz, who had his first date and high school graduation at the Loew’s Kings. Markowitz believes that a revived theater could also serve as an “economic catalyst” for Flatbush Avenue.
But this is not the first time Brooklyn has seen this movie. Prior plans to restore the grand dame of movie palaces have flopped as badly as the sequel to “Gone With the Wind.”
The most-recent plan in the 1990s called for Loew’s to multiplex the Kings —but that failed for lack of funding.
For Bruce Friedman, the head of a grassroots restoration committee, the theater — the city’s third largest behind Radio City and the Theater at Madison Square Garden — has the potential to be so much more than a run-down storehouse of memories.
“It would be a regional destination for the people of Brooklyn,” he said.
When it opened in 1929, the 3,000-seat Kings was billed as one of five “wonder theaters.” It survived the subsequent stock-market crash — showing movies, vaudeville acts and serving as a graduation hall for nearby Erasmus High and many other schools — and lived until the 1970s, when single-screen theaters gave way to bigger multiplexes.
“The theater is a cathedral of the ornate,” said Friedman. Even though the box seats have suffered extensive water damage over the years, and scavengers have stolen original sconces and banisters, the lobby’s Versailles-inspired mosaic ceilings, pink-and-white marble floors and “indoor redwood forest” of fluted walnut columns are in surprisingly good shape.
All it needs now is an audience.
“It has been empty for 30 years, and it will be empty no longer,” said Markowitz.
On Oct. 24 at 10 am, the EDC will lead a tour of the Loew’s Kings for interested developers. Call (212) 618–5721 for information.
©2006 The Brooklyn Paper
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