Jackie Raynal

Bleecker Street Cinema

Some comments found in the maryland

The Bleecker Street Cinema, a popular Greenwich Village theater that has shown foreign and avant-garde films since 1962, will shut down on Aug. 30 because of a sharp rent increase, its owners said yesterday.
The abrupt decision to close the small, two-screen theater came after a bitter struggle for control of the theater’s four-story building at 144 Bleecker Street, near LaGuardia Place. And it shocked the theater’s employees and many of its patrons.
“It’s terrible that a theater like this should close down,” said Steve Chang, a New York University student who was leaving an afternoon showing of “Men in Love” yesterday. “It had a lot more character than all the new multiplex theaters.”
The Bleecker Street Cinema is the latest casualty in a recent string of closings of New York movie theaters that had shown foreign, classic or independently produced films.
The theaters, all closing in the last few years, succumbed to a combination of real-estate pressures, the growing popularity of videocassettes and the desire of larger theater chains to convert single-screen “art” or “revival” theaters into more profitable multi-screen complexes showing new Hollywood movies.
The Cinema Studio, near Lincoln Center, closed this spring, and in the late 1980s the Embassy, Regency, Metro, Thalia and New Yorker theaters on the Upper West Side were all either closed or converted into first-run theaters. In addition, the Film Forum theater in SoHo closed last year, although it will re-open next month at a new location.

^{Andrew Yarrow, Aug. 17, 1990}