Hollywood Cinemas
634 Central Avenue,
East Orange,
NJ
07018
634 Central Avenue,
East Orange,
NJ
07018
2 people
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OPEN. got so excited that I can’t spell anymore
Please change status to OPNE!! This theater will reopen on August 7th. Nice 1940 photo of Spencer Tracy / Rita Johnson in the print version of the Star Ledger:
A once-grand theater answers a curtain call
Sunday, July 31, 2005
BY KEVIN C. DILWORTH
Star-Ledger Staff
It was a rain-swept night on May 16, 1940, but the bad weather did not stop hundreds of New Jerseyans from converging on East Orange’s Hollywood Theatre to see Oscar-winner Spencer Tracy, his box office co-star Rita Johnson, and other celebrities.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “Edison the Man,” a biographical film about famed investor Thomas Edison, lured moviegoers to the theater at 634 Central Ave., off South Harrison Street.
It was the film’s world premiere, and the red carpet was rolled out along the busy thoroughfare.
Newspaper ads billed the motion picture event as “the proudest day in the amusement history of New Jersey,” and noted how then-Gov. A. Harry Moore planned to meet and greet “the greatest galaxy of Hollywood personalities, ever, in the East,” at that 1,629-seat film palace.
That spectacular event took place at the height of the era when the silver screen was the most popular entertainment escape.
However, patron interest in movie houses such as the Hollywood Theatre, and many other similar places around the state and nation, began to wane in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, the theater closed.
Now the Hollywood Theatre is making a cinematic comeback.
A week from tomorrow, the new Hollywood Cinemas — following a more than $1.2 million building gutting, and an extensive top-to-bottom and wall-to-wall renovation job — is set to be reborn as a five-screen theater.
Hollywood Cinemas will join the now six-screen Maplewood Theatre building on Maplewood Avenue in Maplewood, as the only two structures — out of 13 original movie houses that existed in the Essex County suburbs of the Oranges, Maplewood and Livingston, during the early 1950s — to survive as movie houses.
New York City investor Edmondo Schwartz, whose father used to be part of a consortium that owned and operated a chain of RKO movie theaters including the Hollywood in the 1970s, said he believes his investment in the Hollywood, and in East Orange, is worthwhile.
“The (area’s) population was really the bottom line,” Schwartz said the other day. “It’s so under-served with theaters. We saw it was the time, especially when we realized that 250,000 people live within three miles of East Orange. It’s tremendous.”
The two closest multiplex theaters are in West Orange and Newark.
Work crews gutted the Hollywood, replacing the theater’s hole-riddled roof, and removed all the old dingy seats, water-damaged plaster, the original stage and dressing rooms.
No remnants of the former theater’s interior remain, other than the original brick walls that are hidden behind draperies and other wall coverings.
“It probably would have been easier to knock down the building and start new, with the amount of steel (4,500 tons) we put into this building, but it came out beautiful, especially the oversized (movie) screens,” Schwartz said.
The five cinemas will seat a total of 944 people, including 27 seats set aside for the handicapped.
Four of the theaters feature stadium seating, with 23-inch-wide chairs, and one theater, in the spot where the Hollywood’s original stage and dressing rooms used to be, is a traditional theater with seating to match.
In preparation for the movie house’s grand reopening, all the sidewalks outside are scheduled to be replaced this week with a sort of Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The excitement, surrounding the Hollywood’s comeback, has been building since renovation began there a year ago.
“We’ve been waiting for this,” said Tristen Wright, 18, a Newfield Street resident who serves as a volunteer on Mayor Robert Bowser’s Youth Council advisory board. “My friends and I like the idea of being able to go to the movies right here in East Orange, as opposed to traveling to Essex Green (in West Orange) or to Newark.”
Hudson Avenue resident David Taylor, 19, agreed, joking that he has lost more than a few dates because female companions have tired of waiting up to 30 minutes to catch a bus to another city just to see a movie.
Young people are not the only ones who are excited about the theater’s rebirth. Older people are hyped up, too.
The area surrounding the Hollywood is packed with high-rise apartment buildings. The reopening of the Hollywood “is a good thing,” said Maudie Nelson, of Oakwood Avenue, who volunteers in Orange City Hall’s Office of Older Adults.
“Anything is an improvement. A lot of people like going to the movies, but we have (had) to travel all the way to Essex Green or downtown Newark on Bergen Street,” Nelson said. “In my building alone, there are 236 apartment units.”
Nelson, who turned 89 on July 12, said she just hopes municipal officials remember senior citizens especially need delayed street lights, at Central Avenue and South Harrison Street in East Orange, and at Central and Oakwood avenues in Orange, as well as pedestrian crossing lanes.
East Orange resident Michael Thompson, 22, of North Clinton Street said his main concern is how safe patrons will be inside the Hollywood Cinemas.
Schwartz said that in response to public safety concerns, closed circuit television cameras are being installed, “and we’re going to have a (city) police presence there.”
Last-minute construction work in and outside the restored movie house, Schwartz said, includes putting the final touches on a more than 43-foot-long concession stand inside the theater’s new lobby, laying down thick navy-blue carpeting with celestial designs, removing all the construction debris from the building’s west side, and creating an on-site 40-space paved parking lot there.
Still open in 1977, courtesy of Bill Huelbig:
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This used to be an RKO house.
Here’s the latest update. As a former resident of East Orange, I remember!
Old star of stage and screen transformed into multiplex
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Star-Ledger Newspaper
The Hollywood Theatre is coming back to life in East Orange.
A major transformation is under way inside the Italianate-style building that has a red Spanish-tiled roof and ornate pressed-copper facade. After 20 years of being boarded up, a New York City developer has steel workers, electricians, masons, roofers and laborers working in and around the once-famed movie house — at 634 Central Ave., near the Orange border — for a grand reopening.
That will happen in three to four months. Developer Edmondo Schwartz is pumping about $1 million into creating what will become his dream-come-true multiplex: the Hollywood Cinemas. The five cinemas will have a total of 944 seats, including 27 set aside for the handicapped. And a new marquee — to replace the one dismantled over the building’s former eastern entrance, close to South Harrison Street — will be installed on the building’s western end. That is where a new entrance, vestibule and ticket office are being created.
In the days before television, VCRs, video rentals and DVDs, the Hollywood Theatre was the last of four great movie houses in East Orange. Constructed in 1925, the grand Hollywood Theatre featured ornate plaster columns, decorative molding, plush maroon seats and carpeting, a mezzanine-level projection room and bathrooms, a large stage and dressing rooms, a street-level ticket booth, and a 16-ton air conditioner that kept the 1,629-seat theater cool. Many of the building’s exterior physical characteristics will remain the same, but 18 workers are busy replacing the hole-filled roof, removing heavily water-damaged plaster, gutting the three ground-level stores that once existed there, installing 4,500 tons of new steel beams, creating a new mezzanine to house the theater’s projection room, a designing a new 17-foot-wide vestibule, 100-foot-long lobby and 24-foot-long concession stand.
The building’s original stage — where movies were shown on the silver screen, and where music acts, including R&B and soul acts from the 1960s and 1970s, once performed — will be transformed into the Hollywood Cinemas' only non-stadium-seating theater. It will be a conventional theater, with 159 seats, including four for the handicapped.
To coincide with the Hollywood’s rebirth, Bowser said, the city also is planning to work with an architect to create a “Walk of Fame” sidewalk — similar to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles — to honor some of the great personalities and celebrities who either lived, worked or passed through in East Orange. The city has a rich history. Singer-entertainer Dionne Warwick comes from East Orange, as does singer Whitney Houston, actor John Amos, and actress/rap singer/record company executive Dana (Queen Latifah) Owens. East Orange also was home to the late movie actress Joan Caulfield; singer/actor Gordon MacRae of “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” fame; the late country pop singer Eddie Rabbitt; and even movie actress Bette Davis. Davis, a two-time Academy Award winner, lived in a now-demolished house on the southwest corner of North Arlington Avenue and William Street while she briefly attended East Orange High School as a teenager, and Clara Maas, famed nurse heroine who died during a 1901 experiment to see if yellow fever was caused by the bite of mosquitoes, used to live with her family on Main Street.
Thank you Damien! I thought the theatre was in Orange, but I could be wrong. After all, I was there as a teenager and this was 35 years ago. I always thought it was confusing enough to keep all the Oranges straight. It’s nice to know that it’s at least still standing, and that someone’s been trying to reopen it.
I haven’t been able to find the exact address yet, but the theatre is on Central Avenue, near South Harrison Street, in East Orange, NJ.
I believe the theatre is located in East Orange, NJ.
From that city’s mayor’s New Year’s 2004 Address:
“Renovations have begun to reopen the Hollywood Movie Theatre as a Five-Plex Cinema. Scheduled Opening set for the first quarter of 2004.”
Unfortunately, the same official has made similar statements, with accompanying timetables that have gone by the board, in the past. In January 2002, he said, “We will, I repeat, we will have the Hollywood movie theater opened in the next 15 to 18 months.” I haven’t been able to find any updated status on this project.
Historically, I can say that the theatre closed in the early 1970s but that, a few decades earlier, in 1940, it hosted the premiere of “Edison: The Man,” with Spencer Tracy in attendance.