The New York Times’ had a piece yesterday about a possible rehabilitation of one of the great Brooklyn movie palaces, The Loew’s Kings. All I can think of is Richard Grayson’s marvelous story about the movie theaters in Brooklyn in his collection "And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimar Street."

THE KINGS

The Kings was the grandest theater in Brooklyn: a French Renaissance palace whose lobby featured ornate chandeliers, bronze statues, and walnut paneling. Baroque murals with sinister satyr figures danced on the ceiling, and an ornamental peacock reigned above the stage. It was one of five “Wonder Theaters” that the Loews chain opened outside Manhattan in 1929.

In junior high, Eugene and I and the guys we hung out with would freeze our asses off waiting in long lines on Saturday mornings for the first showings of Goldfinger and A Hard Day’s Night.

In the early 1970s, as the neighborhood changed, white moviegoers abandoned the Kings and the other theaters on Flatbush Avenue for the newer twin theaters in shopping centers like Georgetowne and Kings Plaza. But Randi and I used to go here a lot, to avoid the Friday and Saturday night crowds at the suburban-like movie houses.

The last film we saw here was The Tamarind Seed, with Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. We were practically the only white people in an audience of about a hundred, dwarfed in a theater meant to seat 3,500 people.

A documentary about the Kings appeared on PBS in the late 1980s and there always seems to be talk about reviving it now that the neighborhood has boomed again, saved by middle-class West Indians and Haitians. A deal for the Kings to reopen as part of the Magic Johnson chain fell through in the late 1990s because the theater is just too expensive to renovate.

The hulk of The Kings remains: shuttered except for occasional tours by select architecture and design students. Some of them have spotted pigeons flying over the dusty, cobwebbed maroon seats in that blasted ruin, a Sistine Chapel for connoisseurs of decay. — Richard Grayson

THIS FROM THURSDAY’S NEW YORK TIMES:

Everything looked good for the palatial Loew’s Kings Theater in
Flatbush, Brooklyn, for all of about six weeks, the period between its
opening on Sept. 7, 1929, and the stock market crash known as Black
Thursday. The ensuing Great Depression would quickly render it a palace
of misplaced optimism.

 
   

The vaudeville acts, which had
performed twice a day, dropped as if through a trap door in the stage
inside of a year. Silent films were fading away, too, and the
Robert-Morton Theater Pipe Organ, or “Wonder Organ,” was soon reduced
to playing during the sing-along “Follow-the-Bouncing-Ball” songs
between films.

Still, the gargantuan movie house with more than
3,600 seats, one of only five “Wonder Theaters” in the region, remained
in the business of showing films for almost 50 years, closing its doors
to everyone but thieves, vandals and vagrants in the late 1970s.

There
is no curtain to raise today, just another rattling metal gate on
Flatbush Avenue, beneath a stripped facade and facing a row of discount
clothing stores and crowded buses where trolleys used to pass.

The
city took ownership of the Loew’s Kings in 1979, and after false starts
since then, a new push is under way to return it to something like its
old self. There have been two tours of the theater for potential
developers in the last month, providing a rare glimpse at a little bit
left of what the theater used to be.