Following a extremely extended intermission, this theater is finally established to return.
For 17 a long time, Manhattan’s Metro Theater has been accumulating dust on the Upper West Facet. Considering that 2005, the 82-calendar year-previous Art Deco theater has sat vacant, almost residence to several tenants — City Outfitters, World Fitness, Alamo Drafthouse, an arts training nonprofit — all of which eventually fell as a result of.
Now, even though, it’s official: A lease has last but not least been signed and the historic constructing will stay a cinema.
“There have been so several wrong starts off and unsuccessful strategies at The Metro I feel a great deal of us begun to truly feel like Charlie Brown with the soccer and experienced provided up becoming psyched,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine advised The Write-up. When he heard yet a different prospective business enterprise was interested in bringing back the Broadway constructing, “I determined that I would not celebrate right up until I read it straight from a tenant that a lease had been signed.”
And now that’s lastly occurred.
“This is serious, I listened to it immediate from the head of the corporation: The lease has been signed so there’s no turning back,” he went on. “They’re asking for a little bit of anonymity at this issue, but I can explain to you unambiguously that this is real, it is occurring, and it’s a greatest scenario state of affairs.”
The 10,260-square-foot creating will come to be a “Community Entertainment” and “multi-display screen cinema centre, with cafe facilities and group conference rooms on a rental foundation,” longtime proprietor Albert Bialek instructed The West Side Rag. Due to the fact becoming crafted in the 1930s, the two-story making has housed an art residence cinema, pornography theater and two countrywide film chains, and even now offers the exact same landmarked exterior. Its interior, on the other hand, has since been gutted.
“It variety of performs for this new format since it’s going to be a huge number of lesser screens,” Levine mentioned optimistically of the blank interior canvas.
The nonetheless unnamed company of “renowned people” from California are refusing to expose their identity right until they “file their plans” in the future couple months, but they’ll offer you movie-goers an alcohol-geared up dine-in movie expertise, the Rag claimed.
In response to The Post’s inquiry, movie chain Alamo Drafthouse — which practically designed a 5-screen theater in the house just before backing out in 2012 — offered no remark relating to if it is the mystery new tenant.
The news is a substantial boon for the region, which has misplaced a whole lot of firms during the pandemic and is now pockmarked by empty storefronts.
“It’s been a rough two decades,” mentioned Levine, who represented portion of the Upper West Facet through his time on New York Town Council from 2014 to 2021. “We experienced feared this would be a chain outfits store or a pharmacy, even though nearly anything would’ve been improved than abandonment.”
Its vacancy has in fact been not only unhappy but also high-priced: Bialek has been charged over $840,000 in city assets taxes in the time the address has remained vacant, the Real Deal beforehand documented.
“This is gonna rework that place,” Levine went on enthusiastically. “This is just the boost that the neighborhood required.”