Harlem’s RKO Hamilton Theater is one of NYC’s forgotten architectural gems, but its future is in doubt now that it is owned by big shot investor Ben Ashkenazy
The long-neglected, graffiti-scarred RKO Hamilton Theater in Harlem screened its last movie back in 1958, but it still boasts one of the city’s most magnificent interior spaces.
The future of the old vaudeville house is in doubt, however, now that a private investor has shelled out $19 million to buy the property on Broadway and W. 146th St., along with two adjoining parcels.
Real estate kingpin Ben Ashkenazy, whose trophies include some of Madison Avenue’s glittering towers, is the new owner of the semi-derelict gem.
But his intentions for the cavernous, neo-Renaissance Revival palace, with its domed and vaulted ceilings, are not known. Ashkenazy and executives at his company couldn’t be reached over the Passover holiday.
Built in 1913 and converted in 1928 into one of the city’s first theaters to show “talking pictures,” the RKO in its heyday had the grandeur of a cathedral.
The breathtaking interior decor of the 1,857-seat movie palace — a capacity greater than that of the better-known 1,506-seat Apollo Theater on 125th St. — is now musty and crumbling.
It so captivated Brooklyn photographer Matt Lambros, who creates “photographic obituaries” of once-vibrant but now-abandoned urban treasures, that he secured an escort into the closed auditorium and documented its decay.
“Is there a word for feeling nostalgic for something you never experienced? That’s how I felt,” said the 30-year-old Williamsburg-based lensman, who provided the Daily News with the stunning pictures he shot during his 2011 tour.
“The mind wanders back to a time when it was a palace, and everybody was
treated like a king or queen; when the ushers took you to your seats, and people got dressed up, and the big organ played — and you could afford it, too, because the seats cost as little as five cents,” Lambros said.
The organ was silenced in the 1940s, and the last picture show was unspooled in 1958. Seven years later, the RKO Hamilton was bought by an evangelical church, which used the vast auditorium for worship services before leasing out the space.
It became a sports arena and a boxing ring in the 1970s, a disco in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the church sold the property. In recent years, the backstage area was stuffed with refrigerators and rented as a warehouse to a beer wholesaler, Lambros says.
In 2000, the building’s exterior — with its terra cotta facade, decorative arched bays and sculpted, bare-chested female figures doubling as cast-iron support beams — was designated a city landmark.
But the Landmarks Preservation Commission never considered the interior for designation, and so it can be demolished at any time as long as the work has no impact on the exterior.
In November of 2012, the theater was purchased by the 146th Upper Broadway Holdings LLC, one of dozens of real estate firms controlled by the Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., the privately held investment vehicle helmed by the press-shy Ashkenazy.
Lambros hopes the theater’s interior will be preserved.
“If I could choose its future, it would come back to life, renovated and reopened, as a performance space,” Lambros said.
Lambros’ theater pictures are available for sale, from $50 to $200, through his website, afterthefinalcurtain.net.
And Lambros isn’t the only New Yorker who is still smitten with the RKO Hamilton: Billionaire grocery store magnate and mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis, who grew up a few blocks away, was about 10 years old when he watched his first flick there, “Old Yeller,” a 1957 Walt Disney classic about a boy and his beloved but doomed stray dog.
“I cried when the dog died,” Catsimatidis said. “But it was the greatest theater in the world.”
dfeiden@nydailynews.com
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