Broadway’s Last Picture House

A Landmark Upper West Side Cinema gets back to its roots.

By Liam Curedale

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

Walking down Broadway, past CVS, Absolute Bagels, and Smoke Jazz Club, you also pass by a piece of New York City history. Squeezed between a beauty parlor and a thirteen-story luxury condo locals call “the spike” sits the ruins of the Metro Theater. A few rusty letters are all that remain of its once-iconic art deco marquee: the “_ET_O” Theater. The Metro’s two-hundred lights once glittered down Broadway, beckoning to moviegoers from all across the city. Now, tired nannies rest under its shade while waiting for the M104. The bulbs are all unlit or broken. 

And yet, after two decades of false starts, a nonprofit led by Columbia Professor Ira Deutchman acquired the building for $7 million in 2022, alongside a star-studded group of collaborators including Martin Scorsese and Ethan Hawke. An additional $3.5 million investment from the state government made the purchase possible, finally completed a few weeks ago on April 4. With renovation costs expected to exceed $25 million, the newly christened Uptown Film Center still has a long way to go before it reopens its doors. 

The Metro was built between 1932 and 1933, a three-story monolith halfway between West 100th and 101st street. It was constructed at the height of the Great Depression atop the rubble of a seven-story tenement apartment. The Metro’s history since then resembles the other dozen or so mom-and-pop theaters that once dotted the Upper West Side. After the 1950s, the Metro primarily showed independent, foreign, and revival films—aside from a years-long stint as an adult film theater in the 70s and 80s. As other theaters brought in audiences with first-run films, the Metro catered towards nostalgia and curiosity. But this programming model required a loyal, interested audience and a curator well-attuned to their tastes. 

The Upper West Side, particularly above 96th Street, was a predominantly low-income community with a large minority population for most of its history. Throughout the 20th century, as urban renewal projects made the neighborhood a more “desirable” place to live, many local residents were displaced by rising housing costs. In a New York Times article from 1986, “Upper Upper West Side Attracting New Settlers,” one developer states of the Upper West, “[it] proves it is possible to attract additional middle-income families to an area that has low-income people,” and more aspirationally, that “it could [one day] be a heterogeneous community with regard to income and ethnicity.” A different developer put it more plainly: “The park will not move—the bad element and the vacant buildings will.” 

By the 1980s and 90s, rapid gentrification had priced out the audience and community that the Metro depended on. In the 1930s, there were nearly 20 cinemas in the area; by the 1990s, there were four. In the new millennium, the Metro was the last one standing. 

“Business was terrible,” said Peter Elson, the Metro’s final operator. He had taken helm of the Metro in 2004 with the hope that local interest would prove enough to keep the arthouse theater afloat. But in addition to shifting local demographics, Elson was fighting against a national trend. The preeminence of at-home video and multiplexes in the 90s and early 2000s made it difficult for independent theaters to survive across the country, let alone in an increasingly expensive Upper West. 

The Metro survived as long as it did largely because its beautiful art deco facade was designated a New York City Landmark in 1989. Today, the designation has saved the building’s exterior and little else. After the Metro’s final closing in 2005, the owner tore out its interior so violently that locals compared the scene to an active warzone in an article published in The Observer. Neighborhood protests and high construction costs have since prevented it from being turned into an Urban Outfitters, an Alamo Drafthouse, or a Planet Fitness.

But Deutchman’s purchase of the building promises to bring the theater back to its community-oriented roots. Unlike its previous iterations, the Uptown Film Center will operate as a nonprofit, with a programming model built around revival shows and community initiatives. According to their website, this could include film programming for local schoolchildren developed alongside teachers and administrators. 

In successfully purchasing the space, Deutchman has already made it further than his corporate predecessors. Whether the seventh owner of this 90-year-old building finally sticks is another question—one that, for now, the ‘_ET_O’ Theater is not yet in a position to answer. The heart of the matter is this: The Uptown Film Center can only succeed if the Upper West Side it serves still resembles the community that once filled those few-hundred seats.