By the way, when I was a little kid in the early 1950s, I used to get Riverhead mixed up with New York City! The lights were that bright, and Main Street was that bustling, especially for christmas shopping! The News-Review came out twice a week, with funny pages. And the Suffolk Theater was to Riverhead what Notre Dame is to Paris! Going there was a pilgrimage! The only problem was, it was sold out when there was a big new movie in town!
Hey, I love Riverhead! I have family there! But the town planners are totally corrupt. The most magically beautiful & unique little ecosystem on Long Island (if not the planet) was recently bulldozed for a golf course with the blessings of the Town Fathers. With that sort of vision guiding the town’s development, we’ll be lucky to get a Home Depot annex in the Suffolk Theater.
New York’s black community (the political part of it anyway) was extremely pissed off when Columbia took over the Audubon, turning it into a research facility for biotech or something, instead of preserving it as a cultural center and historic landmark dedicated to the memory of Malcolm X. Radio station WBAI discussed this endlessly for a year or so. It’s nice the restored facade is beautiful, and it’s nice that Columbia saw fit to give it the name and memorial. But it’s still part of the process of gradual, inexorable gentrification (and bleaching) of Harlem, whose black residents never did control any of the real estate in their neighborhood.
There was an arty soft-core-porn movie called “Variety” (late 1980’s?) that used this theater as its main character, but some of it was actually shot at a 42nd street hard-core movie house. The plot involved a girl who took a job as an usherette and gradually got drawn into the degenerate eroticism of her workplace.
In 1969-70, I used to go there every couple of weeks with a friend when we finished doing layouts and cartoons at Rat Subterranean News around the corner on 14th street. My friend had a bad habit of bringing a few of bottles of Ripple wine, and tossing our empties against the side wall – the audience barely noticed. Admission prices started at about 25 cents in the morning, and gradually rose to a dollar or two by evening. The shows – always double features – were absolutely random. A typical show would combine a kiddie movie about a pet bear cub and the trashiest low-budget porn available – I think this was before the ratings systems was mandated. The weirdest thing was the rest rooms, both of which were unusable due to always being jam-packed with homosexual orgies; if you opened the door, someone would grab you to try to pull you in to join the party.
Next door was a little underground bar called the Dugout. In early 1970, I made the mistake of taking a girl there. She was a member of W.I.T.C.H., the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, which had just seized control of Rat (purging the male staff, myself included) in one of the historic early victories of radical feminism. We didn’t realize the Dugout had a male-only policy; it turned out she was the first female to actually get served at the bar, but with a polite warning not to come back. Except for a name change and a female bartender, the Dugout was exactly the same in 2004. The Variety Photoplay didn’t look all that different either.
The Suffolk Theater is probably the most magnificent classic 1930’s movie palace surviving in any American small town. Its decor, more Art Neuveau than Art Deco in style, is still intact – although endangered by lack of maintenance. The attempted restoration was hugely expensive, but that was due more to corruption that the amount of work actually.
Riverhead is a very poor town that has some great old buildings on Main Street, finer than anything in the nearby Hamptons, left over from its heyday circa 1900, when it was the center of a thriving agricultural economy and contained all the government offices and courthouses of Suffolk County. Repeated campaigns to “revive” the crackhouse-infested Main Street have been ineffectual; meanwhile, the by-pass a mile north has been developed with huge super-stores and fast food places.
Eastern Long Island’s spectacular real estate boom, which has been gathering momentum for decades, eventually has to reach into Riverhead. When it finally does, it would be nice if the Suffolk Theater was still there and available for its long-awaited reincarnation as a cultural center.
The other theater on West Main Street was a bizarre-looking shabby place with a facade of yellow and black diamond shapes, which showed second-run westerns and B movies. It folded in the 1960s, and was torn down a few years later.
The last owner that actually operated the Suffolk Theater (formerly the flagship of the United Artists chain on Long Island) was Ritchie Wesler (stepson of Joe Puma, see Hampton Arts) but despite his efforts, no one came to the movies, even with very cheap admission prices. The last great event at the place, so far as I know, was a anti-nuclear benefit concert starring Pete Seeger around 1980.
The old Vail Music Hall around the corner is even more of a gem, and it has attracted most of the limited supply of grassroots volunteer energy available for restoring theaters in Riverhead.
I worked at the Hampton Arts for a year or so 1974-75, during one of its periodic renovations. The place had quite a unique history. Before the Hampton Arts went up, circa 1925-1930, movies were shown around the corner at Mechanics' Hall (later the Masonic Hall, then a nightclub called Scarlett’s). The original owner had no insurance, and not much money, so when it burned down, he rebuilt it himself! It was home-made, with all sorts of strange little nooks and crannies where you could see the chicken-wire-and-cement structure. While he was rebuilding, circa 1937, the new Main Street Theater opened (a modest mini-palace now known at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center) – and the Hampton Arts couldn’t compete, particularly in such a small town.
I think the place was abandoned for about fifteen years, then in the early 1950s it opened as a live summer stock theater called the Hampton Star, which lasted for a few seasons. After that, irt became a struggling movie house again – at which point it was rechristened the Hampton Arts (the most economical name change available, not requiring any new letters on the sign).
Around 1958, the place was bought by Joe Puma, an impressive old guy who also had something to do with the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and other such sophisticated and cosmopolitan enterprises.
When Joe Puma was running the place, it showed almost exclusively foreign films – Fellini, Bardot, and all that – with predictably tiny audiences, and with plenty of hostility from the very conservative and provincial year-round community, who thought it was undermining local morals. There were even art shows in the lobby, as well as free coffee.
After Puma died, around 170, his widow and stepson took over, and they managed to turn it into a semi-mainstream moviehouse – but it still retained its old eccentricity. They had to work hard to compete with the United Artists chain and were involved in a big lawsuit to break UA’s monopoly on movie distribution. Their usually low-budget renovations were done by local characters who had their own odd ideas about interior paneling and exterior clapboard siding. The one big extravagance was antique cast-iron seats, incredibly heavy, with deep red plush cushions – the balcony groaned under their weight and sagged a few inches, and there was a visible crack. But like everything else, it somehow held up – the original owner’s reconstruction may have been crude but nothing ever actually collapsed. The people who worked there tended to keep cats in the theater, and I used to let in anyone I knew for free on winter evenings when no one else was around. Our wages were abysmal; I survived on peanut M&M’s. The projectionist and I enjoyed blasting the soundtrack to The Harder They Come before every movie. Several of our local loonies used to hang out, stay warm, and help me change the marquee letters. My work there ended after my boss (the stepson, an entertainingly Napoleonic character) changed his mind every evening for about four weeks running about what color spots he wanted beaming down onto the screen between shows – each change of bulbs meant another trip carrying dozens of bulbs down a narrow catwalk with no headroom, and nothing but flimsey ceiling panels between me and the cast iron seats fifty feet below.
The place was “twinned” around 1980, and then sold to a big chain (Cineplex Odeon, I think), who predictably gave up on it a few years later. (I adopted one of the stray cats and named her Puma in honor of the late Joe. The best of the murals I’d painted for the walls were looted.) The last I heard, the Hampton Synagogue had taken over the property.
By the way, when I was a little kid in the early 1950s, I used to get Riverhead mixed up with New York City! The lights were that bright, and Main Street was that bustling, especially for christmas shopping! The News-Review came out twice a week, with funny pages. And the Suffolk Theater was to Riverhead what Notre Dame is to Paris! Going there was a pilgrimage! The only problem was, it was sold out when there was a big new movie in town!
Hey, I love Riverhead! I have family there! But the town planners are totally corrupt. The most magically beautiful & unique little ecosystem on Long Island (if not the planet) was recently bulldozed for a golf course with the blessings of the Town Fathers. With that sort of vision guiding the town’s development, we’ll be lucky to get a Home Depot annex in the Suffolk Theater.
New York’s black community (the political part of it anyway) was extremely pissed off when Columbia took over the Audubon, turning it into a research facility for biotech or something, instead of preserving it as a cultural center and historic landmark dedicated to the memory of Malcolm X. Radio station WBAI discussed this endlessly for a year or so. It’s nice the restored facade is beautiful, and it’s nice that Columbia saw fit to give it the name and memorial. But it’s still part of the process of gradual, inexorable gentrification (and bleaching) of Harlem, whose black residents never did control any of the real estate in their neighborhood.
There was an arty soft-core-porn movie called “Variety” (late 1980’s?) that used this theater as its main character, but some of it was actually shot at a 42nd street hard-core movie house. The plot involved a girl who took a job as an usherette and gradually got drawn into the degenerate eroticism of her workplace.
In 1969-70, I used to go there every couple of weeks with a friend when we finished doing layouts and cartoons at Rat Subterranean News around the corner on 14th street. My friend had a bad habit of bringing a few of bottles of Ripple wine, and tossing our empties against the side wall – the audience barely noticed. Admission prices started at about 25 cents in the morning, and gradually rose to a dollar or two by evening. The shows – always double features – were absolutely random. A typical show would combine a kiddie movie about a pet bear cub and the trashiest low-budget porn available – I think this was before the ratings systems was mandated. The weirdest thing was the rest rooms, both of which were unusable due to always being jam-packed with homosexual orgies; if you opened the door, someone would grab you to try to pull you in to join the party.
Next door was a little underground bar called the Dugout. In early 1970, I made the mistake of taking a girl there. She was a member of W.I.T.C.H., the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, which had just seized control of Rat (purging the male staff, myself included) in one of the historic early victories of radical feminism. We didn’t realize the Dugout had a male-only policy; it turned out she was the first female to actually get served at the bar, but with a polite warning not to come back. Except for a name change and a female bartender, the Dugout was exactly the same in 2004. The Variety Photoplay didn’t look all that different either.
The Suffolk Theater is probably the most magnificent classic 1930’s movie palace surviving in any American small town. Its decor, more Art Neuveau than Art Deco in style, is still intact – although endangered by lack of maintenance. The attempted restoration was hugely expensive, but that was due more to corruption that the amount of work actually.
Riverhead is a very poor town that has some great old buildings on Main Street, finer than anything in the nearby Hamptons, left over from its heyday circa 1900, when it was the center of a thriving agricultural economy and contained all the government offices and courthouses of Suffolk County. Repeated campaigns to “revive” the crackhouse-infested Main Street have been ineffectual; meanwhile, the by-pass a mile north has been developed with huge super-stores and fast food places.
Eastern Long Island’s spectacular real estate boom, which has been gathering momentum for decades, eventually has to reach into Riverhead. When it finally does, it would be nice if the Suffolk Theater was still there and available for its long-awaited reincarnation as a cultural center.
The other theater on West Main Street was a bizarre-looking shabby place with a facade of yellow and black diamond shapes, which showed second-run westerns and B movies. It folded in the 1960s, and was torn down a few years later.
The last owner that actually operated the Suffolk Theater (formerly the flagship of the United Artists chain on Long Island) was Ritchie Wesler (stepson of Joe Puma, see Hampton Arts) but despite his efforts, no one came to the movies, even with very cheap admission prices. The last great event at the place, so far as I know, was a anti-nuclear benefit concert starring Pete Seeger around 1980.
The old Vail Music Hall around the corner is even more of a gem, and it has attracted most of the limited supply of grassroots volunteer energy available for restoring theaters in Riverhead.
I worked at the Hampton Arts for a year or so 1974-75, during one of its periodic renovations. The place had quite a unique history. Before the Hampton Arts went up, circa 1925-1930, movies were shown around the corner at Mechanics' Hall (later the Masonic Hall, then a nightclub called Scarlett’s). The original owner had no insurance, and not much money, so when it burned down, he rebuilt it himself! It was home-made, with all sorts of strange little nooks and crannies where you could see the chicken-wire-and-cement structure. While he was rebuilding, circa 1937, the new Main Street Theater opened (a modest mini-palace now known at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center) – and the Hampton Arts couldn’t compete, particularly in such a small town.
I think the place was abandoned for about fifteen years, then in the early 1950s it opened as a live summer stock theater called the Hampton Star, which lasted for a few seasons. After that, irt became a struggling movie house again – at which point it was rechristened the Hampton Arts (the most economical name change available, not requiring any new letters on the sign).
Around 1958, the place was bought by Joe Puma, an impressive old guy who also had something to do with the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and other such sophisticated and cosmopolitan enterprises.
When Joe Puma was running the place, it showed almost exclusively foreign films – Fellini, Bardot, and all that – with predictably tiny audiences, and with plenty of hostility from the very conservative and provincial year-round community, who thought it was undermining local morals. There were even art shows in the lobby, as well as free coffee.
After Puma died, around 170, his widow and stepson took over, and they managed to turn it into a semi-mainstream moviehouse – but it still retained its old eccentricity. They had to work hard to compete with the United Artists chain and were involved in a big lawsuit to break UA’s monopoly on movie distribution. Their usually low-budget renovations were done by local characters who had their own odd ideas about interior paneling and exterior clapboard siding. The one big extravagance was antique cast-iron seats, incredibly heavy, with deep red plush cushions – the balcony groaned under their weight and sagged a few inches, and there was a visible crack. But like everything else, it somehow held up – the original owner’s reconstruction may have been crude but nothing ever actually collapsed. The people who worked there tended to keep cats in the theater, and I used to let in anyone I knew for free on winter evenings when no one else was around. Our wages were abysmal; I survived on peanut M&M’s. The projectionist and I enjoyed blasting the soundtrack to The Harder They Come before every movie. Several of our local loonies used to hang out, stay warm, and help me change the marquee letters. My work there ended after my boss (the stepson, an entertainingly Napoleonic character) changed his mind every evening for about four weeks running about what color spots he wanted beaming down onto the screen between shows – each change of bulbs meant another trip carrying dozens of bulbs down a narrow catwalk with no headroom, and nothing but flimsey ceiling panels between me and the cast iron seats fifty feet below.
The place was “twinned” around 1980, and then sold to a big chain (Cineplex Odeon, I think), who predictably gave up on it a few years later. (I adopted one of the stray cats and named her Puma in honor of the late Joe. The best of the murals I’d painted for the walls were looted.) The last I heard, the Hampton Synagogue had taken over the property.