The Lost Cinemas of the West Village: The Carmine Theater

The Carmine Theater stood at 21 Carmine Street from at least 1910 to 1925. Our Lady of Pompeii church now occupies that site. The Carmine showed silent films, in the early days reelsno longer than 30 minutes. In its final year, it reportedly had a capacity of 600.

The Carmine Theater opened in an area that still contained remnants of a rough and tumble vice-ridden era, where many immigrant Italian families had replaced the Irish in the late 19^th century. In 1911, Mary Heaton Vorse, a journalist and social activist, visited the Carmine Theater and reported in a magazine article that audience members, many being mothers and their children, talked with each other and to the figures on the screen. The film was about a cowboy who stole to provide for his dying wife and the audience noisily debated his dilemma.

In 1925, the City condemned land and razed buildings, evicting thousands—including the Carmine Theater—in order to extend Sixth Avenue south from Carmine Street,where it abruptly ended, to Canal Street in preparation for the new IND subway. Our Lady of Pompeii church, then across Sixth Avenue at 210 Bleecker Street (lately occupied by the American Apparel clothing store) was rebuilt at the corner of Carmine and Bleecker streets. It occupied several plots (now consolidated to one) including the one on which the Carmine Theater had stood. The new church was dedicated on October, 7, 1928.

The Carmine Theater lives on in two paintings by John Sloan (1871-1951), one of The Eight, a group of Philadelphia artists and illustrators who took on the art establishment when they moved to New York in 1904. Later, their style became known as The Ashcan School because these artists painted crowded urban scenes.(The Carmine Theater is the only Sloan painting to actually feature an ashcan!)

In 1912, Sloan was living at 155 East 22^nd Street and often walked down to Greenwich Village. In his diary for January 25, he wrote “Out for a walk, down to Bleecker and Carmine streets, where I think I have soaked in something to paint.” The following day he noted “Started ‘Carmine Theatre’ memory of yesterday.” He had sketched the theater the previous day. In May 1912, he set up a studio in the Varitype Building at 35 Sixth Avenue, which had opened in 1907, and on October 19, he and his wife Dolly moved to 61 Grove Street.

A year later Sloan painted the Carmine Theater again, in a night scene, calling it simply “Movies.” The featured film was A Romance of the Harem. One of Sloan’s biographers, John Loughery, described Movies as follows: “[It] shows the same theater at night, aglow with bright lights, and the street crowded with more children, couples, and unattached men and women appraising their chances with the opposite sex.”

Another writer, Susan Saccoccia, also noted the extra life in Movies. “Sloan’s painting Movies, 1913, is about the show on the sidewalk as well as the movie parlor. The sealed-up structure that Sloan depicted in The Carmine Street (sic) Theater, 1912, here bursts into life as a stage set for the pageant on the street: Children gawk, adults flirt, and a few patrons wander into the theater. One man slouches against the wall surveying the scene—perhaps a stand-in for Sloan.”

In early 1916, Sloan exhibited Carmine Theater in his first one-man show, at the Whitney Studio, 8 West 8^th Street. The New York Sun’s art critic described the nun as a Sister of Charity passing the cinema with an uncouth stride, glancing at the children hoping to see a movie.

In 1931, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the arts patron and sculptress, turned theStudio into the Whitney Museum of American Art, which remained on West 8^th Street until 1954. The Whitney re-opens on May 1^st, on Gansevoort Street by the High Line. The original Studio has housed the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, & Sculpture since 1966.

Coda: The leader of The Eight was Robert Henri, who gave life drawing classes at the New York School of Art. In 1906, Sloan took over Henri’s class for a month. One of his students was Edward Hopper, ten years younger. Later they became contemporaries and mutual admirers of each other’s work. They both painted several cinema scenes.

Sources:

Goodrich, L., “John Sloan”, MacMillan Co., New York, 1952.

Levin, G., “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography”, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995.

Loughery, J., “John Sloan: Painter and Rebel”, Henry Holt, Inc., New York, 1995.

McFarland, G., “Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918”, University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.

Scott, D., “John Sloan”, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1975.

St. John, B., Ed., “John Sloan’s New York Scene”, Diaries 1906-1913.Harper and Row, New York, 1965.

Zurier, R., “City, Stage, and Screen: John Sloan’s Urban Theater”. Collected in “On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth Century American Art”, McDonnell, P., Ed., Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002.

Saccoccia, S., “The Passing City”, Humanities, September/October 2007, Vol. 28, No. 5.

Cinematreasures.org. (Contributors: D. Farley, K. Roe, and D. Rougas).

Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.