Cinemas in Bay Ridge | www.splicetoday.com

This week, news broke that one of the last two theaters in the Bronx, Concourse Village in Fordham, has closed, leaving only one left in the entire borough, in far-flung Co-Op City. First-run movies will soon be transferred to streaming services; last summer, films such as Barbie And Oppenheimerexpected to be a success, was the first to hit theaters, but its days are numbered.

When I was growing up in Bay Ridge, where I lived from 1957 to 1993, we had our choice of several neighborhood movie theaters. Above is the Loew's Alpine Theater at 5th Ave. and Bay Ridge Ave. (69th St.) in 1941. The Alpine opened in 1921 and was a movie theater from the start, although it did have a full orchestra during the silent era. A feature film cost 15 cents, but you could book a full day on Saturday or Sunday for 25 cents. It was the first movie theater in Brooklyn without a balcony, but still had 2,200 seats. It was never a vaudeville theater, but a singer or instrumentalist would perform between shows.

In 1976, the Alpine had two screens and in 2015, eight. It lost its Loew sponsorship decades ago and is now operated independently. The Alpine is the only one of the once so many cinemas in Bay Ridge that still exists. The films I saw here included Yellow Submarine (1968) and Return of the Jedi (1983 – I waited in line for an hour in the rain for this).

In 1941, the daily specials were Cracked nutsabout a lottery winner who comes into contact with gangsters and a fake robot; Shemp Howard, without the other two Stooges, was there. In The Priest of Panamint A preacher tries to tame a California mining town. The photo at right shows Paul Nielsen Furniture, which survived until the 1980s.

At least the Fortway still looks like it was a theater. It opened on October 21, 1927, for movies and variety shows and was a one-movie theater for most of its existence, but as other theaters closed, the Fortway became a triple screen theater in the 1970s and expanded to six screens in the 1980s. It succumbed in 2005 and became a convenience store in 2007.

One of the long-lost aspects of neighborhood theaters in the 1970s is that they often served as venues for rock concerts. The Grateful Dead played weekday matinee shows at the 46th Street Rock Palace, and Jethro Tull, the Kinks and other classic acts performed at the Ritz in Staten Island. The Fortway was no slouch. Chuck Berry performed here in 1972 when he toured his only No. 1 hit, “My Ding-A-Ling.”

The Dyker, 86^th St. and Gelston Ave., opened in 1926 and closed in 1977. It was just a few blocks from our house and was the theater we visited most often. I remember it too – as well as several bars on 86^th St. – for blasts of cold air as we passed by in the summer. Our building wasn't wired to handle the power that air conditioning required, so we had to endure the heat.

Pay TV heralded the end of many neighborhood movie theaters, and the Dyker displayed this message prominently on its billboard in the early 1970s: “Stop Pay TV!” Pay TV was not stopped, and the Dyker gave up in the mid-1970s, with one of the last contributions Willard. Although I have seen many films here, I remember the double bill in late 1970: one of the two Dracula films that year, starring the inimitable Christopher Lee as the Count, and “Trog,” Joan Crawford's last starring role, in which she plays a prehistoric man against a heavily prosthetic Joe Cornelius rampaging through the British countryside. In recent years the theater has housed Lerner Shops and Modell's Sporting Goods, and is currently seeking a tenant.

The port, on 4.^th Ave. and 93^rd St., opened in 1935 and its modern facade is still there, as is its canopy, now laden with signage for the current tenant, Harbor Fitness. It was about 12 blocks from our headquarters, so we didn't show up there often, but I remember visiting in 1970 to see Under the planet the monkeyset in the ruins of New York City and in which Charlton Heston blows up the planet with a hydrogen bomb worshipped by underground mutants. The Harbor closed in 1979 and ended with the Oscar-winning Norma Rae.

I remember RKO Shore Rd., 86^th St. between 4^th and 5^th Aves., the place where I bought records in the 1970s and 1980s because back then the building was home to Nobody Beats the Wiz. Between 1924 and 1951 it was a theater, so I never experienced it as such. Currently the building houses a Victoria's Secret store.

—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY and author of the books The forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)