A Story That Ends Badly

I’ve talked a bit about the differences between the nineteenth-century suburban town of Flushing and the dense twentieth-century urban area I grew up in. I came across this drawing in the New York Public Library scrapbooks, and it brought up a topic I’ve avoided until now, which is the RFO Keith’s movie palace.

There’s no date on the drawing and a small hotel in Flushing is not the kind of place that gets a lot of attention, but it’s a pleasant-looking wood-frame building, not much difference in general appearance from a large house. Flushing’s Broadway became a piece of Northern Boulevard, a Frankenstein street stitched together from pieces of several towns’ street layout. Main Street’s northern end is at a tee intersection there, and the specified location – on Broadway opposite Main – is very familiar to me, even through the hotel is not. In 1903, five years after Flushing became part of the city of New York, with yellow indicating wood-frame buildings:

That site is where, in 1928, a grand vaudeville theater was constructed (I don’t know when the hotel closed), which was converted to movie use as the RKO Keith’s a few years later. It was still a single theater as late as 1976, with roughly 3000 seats in the auditorium. There’s a long list of movies I saw there, on that giant screen, starting with Fantasia and including, if I recall correctly, the 1976 King Kong. In 1977 the auditorium was split into three theaters and I know I saw Return of the Jedi there.

Thomas Lamb, the architect, designed a number of Broadway theaters, and his work at Keith’s was not exactly restrained. From the New York Landmarks Commission records:

Several developers tried to get permission to demolish the building to create a site for something newer and bigger, starting in the mid-1980s. The interior had local landmark designation – the exterior was basically a big yellow brick box – but it slowly rotted away in abandonment. A few years ago, a deal was reached to preserve the lobby and entry-foyer interior plaster as the entry to a new building, and the theater was demolished, after plaster removal. Old Structures provided some of the engineering for that effort, but I found that I couldn’t work on it: it was literally dismantling pieces of my childhood. I recently wrote about knowing when it is too late for preservation, but that’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have a personal stake in it. I can close my eyes and be transported back to that incredible lobby and the age of ten, and that kind of feeling is not amenable to logic.