The Bleecker Street Cinema

WHO STARTED THE BLEECKER STREET CINEMA?

Lionel Rogosin was born January 22, 1924 in New York City. He studied chemical engineering at Yale, served in the Navy, and worked in his father’s textile firm until he turned his attention to making films about global social justice issues.

One of his earliest films was about South African apartheid. In order to shoot this film - about a Johannesburg migrant worker - under the disapproving noses of the authorities there, he pretended that his project was about African music. Finished in 1958, the resulting film, “Come Back, Africa,” was well-received and won the Grand Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival.

However, he was unable to arrange for American distribution for the film and so, in 1960, he founded The Bleecker Street Cinema to showcase independent films. It soon became, in the words of film critic and historian James Hoberman, one of "three key revival houses: The New Yorker, the Bleecker Street, and the Thalia.”

Rogosin continued running the theater until 1974, when he sold it to Sid Geffen. He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in December 2000.

For more about Lionel Rogosin, please see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Rogosin

Two 1940’s photographs of the Mori’s/Bleecker Street Cinema building with a forlorn “For Sale” sign hanging in a second floor window.

In 1883, restauranteur Placido Mori hired then-unknown architect Raymond Hood to create a facade for the two row houses at 144 and 146 Bleecker Street so that they could be combined into an upscale eating establishment. Hood was paid for the job with an apartment in the building as well as an open tab in the restaurant.

The architect would go on to design the Daily News building and Rockefeller Center as well as many other important works.

The Bleecker Street Cinema was established in the building in 1960.

For more information about Raymond Hood, see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Hood

144 Bleecker Street, October, 2023

An uncredited photo from the 60’s, looking west on Bleecker Street from LaGuardia Place. The theater is on the left. The venerable Dugout, The Bitter End, and Circle in the Square Theater can be seen on the right.

Life in the ol’ gal yet.

State Pot Dispensary Template To Be Unveiled In West Village: Report The reopening of Smacked Village will be the first of 20 new pot shops featuring the new state-wide store template.

This neglected shell at 145 Bleecker Street, across from the neglected shell that was once the Bleecker Street Cinema, held a Chinese restaurant in the 80’s. Sometimes, at the end of the night, they’d send over a carafe of hot saké and a bunch of matching ceramic cups, which would be returned the next day. It seems times were a bit different then.

A recent historical feature on The Bleecker Street Cinema building courtesy of Ephemeral New York:

From posh residences to art movie theater, the many lives of two Bleecker Street houses Near the corner of Bleecker Street and LaGuardia Place stand what remains of two houses. At almost 200 years old, time has taken its toll on these twin Greenwich Village dowagers. Cracked ground-fl…

An undated and uncredited photo showing the elevated train station on what is now LaGuardia Place, with the Mori’s/Bleecker Street Cinema building to the right.

A uniquely angled image showing the top floor. Getty images.

The current state of The Bleecker Street cinema location. Photo by Jason Kessler

1987 photo by Louise Egan, courtesy of Bob Egan.

Well, the Duane Reade™ is gone. Waiting to see what comes in. Call me crazy, but I think the space would be perfect for a repertory cinema.

Rare shot of the theater interior, from the projection booth, from "Desperately Seeking Susan." There was a courtyard with an elaborate terra cotta fountain through french doors behind the screen.

Aidan Quinn in the Bleecker Street Cinema projection booth, from "Desperately Seeking Susan." The ladder up to the booth could be a harrowing climb with heavy, unwieldy 35mm film cans.

And today...

From the NY Times:

Bleecker Street Cinema Closing The Bleecker Street Cinema, one of New York City's best-known theaters devoted to innovative film programs, will close its doors on Monday night, said Nick Russo Nicolaou, the theater operator. "With all the multi-screen theaters now in Greenwich Village, the Bleecker Street Cinema just doesn't make…

Found: the frescoes of The Bleecker St. Cinema.

Found Frescoes by Quintanilla, 144-146 Bleecker Street On November 4, 1990, Christopher Gray published an article in the New York Times in which he reconstructs the history of this site on Bleecker Street, in an attempt to unravel the enigma of a remar…

Lost: the frescoes at The Bleecker St. Cinema.

Streetscapes: The Bleecker Street Cinema; The 'Lost' Frescoes Of an Artist-Soldier THOUSANDS of avant-garde and foreign films were shown at the Bleecker Street Cinema at 144 Bleecker from its opening in 1962 to its closing last August. It is now a gay p***o house, but what is surely its most interesting drama -- involving an artist-soldier, the Spanish Civil War, five supposedly l…

From Wikipedia:

The Bleecker Street Cinema was an art house movie theater located at 144 Bleecker Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. It became a landmark of Greenwich Village and an influential venue for filmmakers and cinemaphiles through its screenings of foreign and independent films. It closed in 1990, reopened as a gay adult theater for a time afterward, then again briefly showed art films until closing for good in 1991.

The building at 144 Bleecker Street in New York City's Greenwich Village that would eventually house the Bleecker Street Cinema was originally built in 1832 as two rowhouses at 144 and 146 Bleecker Street. Placido Mori converted 144 into the restaurant Mori in 1883.[1] As architecture historian Christopher Gray wrote,

At some point, [Placido] Mori befriended a novice architect, Raymond Hood, gave him a house tab and an apartment upstairs and in 1920 had him design a new facade for the building to include 146 Bleecker. Hood gave the buildings a row of Doric columns across the first floor, imitation Federal lintels over the windows and a setback penthouse studio.[1]

Mori closed in 1937. The building remained unoccupied until 1944 when political and activist organizations including Free World House headquartered there for two years. Sometime afterward, the space became the Restaurant Montparnasse.[1] By 1959, the building was owned by New York University.[2]

Filmmaker and social activist Lionel Rogosin founded the 200-seat Bleecker Street Cinema in 1960 in order to exhibit his controversial 1959 film Come Back, Africa.[3][4] In the early 1960s, the independent-filmmakers' group The Film-Makers' Cooperative, of which Rogosin was a supporter, showed experimental movies there as midnight screenings.[5] Soon the venue became, in the words of film critic and historian James Hoberman, one of "three key revival houses: The New Yorker, the Bleecker Street [Cinema], and the Thalia", in New York City during the 1950s and 1960.[6]

Film critic Rudy Franchi, at one time the theater's program director, recalled that the house cat, Breathless, named for that Godard film,[7] would often "escape from the office area and start to climb the movie screen. ... I would sometimes get a buzz on the house phone from the projection booth with the terse message 'Cat's on the screen.'"[8] The theater cat at the venue's 1990 closing was named Wim, after director Wim Wenders.

Sid Geffen purchased the theater in 1973[2] or 1974,[3] and ran it with his wife, then named Jackie Raynal.[2] That same year, Geffen bought the Carnegie Hall Cinema, housed in the famed music hall.[6] Future October Films co-founder and United Artists studio executive Bingham Ray began his film career in 1981 as a manager and programmer at the theater,[9] and longtime Film Forum programmer and film historian Bruce Goldstein had his first New York theater job at Geffen's two venues.[10] Geffen died in 1986.[11]

Bleecker Street Cinema, 1980s
In 1990, his widow, by then remarried and named Jackie Raynal-Sarré,[12] said that because Geffen left no will, she partnered with developer John Souto to buy out Geffen's children from a previous marriage.[2] She further said that Souto, after renting to her for four years for $160,000 annually, raised the rent to $275,000, more than the theater could sustain. Following a lawsuit and court proceedings, a judge ordered the two co-owners to bid on the building. "We came in with [a] $3.3 million [bid] and he came in with $3.4 million," Raynal-Sarré said.[2] In its final configuration, it had a main auditorium of 171 seats, and the 78-seat James Agee Room.[13]

The theater closed on September 6, 1990. The last film to start was Aki Kaurismäki's 74-minute Ariel, and the last film to end was the nearly two-hour Jesus of Montreal.[2] The last film in the James Agee Room was Roger Stigliano's Fun Down There.[11] By November of that year, it had reopened as a gay adult-film theater.[1] Sometime afterward it returned to its art-house roots and then closed a final time on Monday night, September 2, 1991. Its final features were Alex van Warmerdam's Dutch comedy Vo**ur; the documentary Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight; Ari Roussimof's war-veteran drama Shadows in the City; and Francis Teri's horror movie Suckling.[13] The theater's final operator was Nick Russo Nicolaou.[13]

Photo by Robert Otter, 1965

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Jackie Raynal, owner

A previous incarnation. Photo by Berenice Abbott, November 21, 1935

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