The Fugazy Theater stood at what is now the corner of West Houston Street and Sixth Avenue from 1923 to 1929. The William F. Passannante Playground now occupies that site.
The Fugazy initially showed silent films and played vaudeville. Its capacity was 1,687. Hubert J. Fugazy built the cinema between McDougal and Hancock Streets. Reilly and Hall were the architects. (They also designed the Sheridan Theater on West 12th Street—see, WestView News, April, 2015.) The 1927 Film Daily Yearbook listed the Fugazy Theater at “150 Houston Street.”
The New York Tribune reported on November 17, 1922, that Fugazy and his partner Antonio Rosetti had leased the three-story theater being erected on the north-west corner of MacDougal and Houston Streets to the MacDougal Amusement Company, one of whose directors was a Municipal Court Judge named Leopold Prince.
Fugazy and this company fell out over a disputed payment for assignment of the lease and Fugazy lost. By that time, February 1929, the theater was no more. (Prince was an accomplished violinist who founded the New York City Symphony in 1927, and conducted it for twenty-five years.)
In the late 1980s, Village author Terry Miller interviewed longtime resident Ermanno Stingo, who “remembers Hancock street as a block-long affair that teemed with people and traffic. ‘Remember, there were few through-streets connecting Bleecker and Houston before Sixth Avenue went through… and I also remember being taken by my mother to the cavernous Fugazy Theatre, which stood at the bottom of Hancock at Houston Street. Once, just after we paid our dime admission, some man pulled a gun and held up the box office. Mother dragged me down the aisle and hid me behind the piano. I remember the pianist went right on playing, as if nothing had happened… ’”
This might have been the occurrence reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on January 14, 1924. The previous evening while the theater was full, bandits held up the assistant cashier and stole $2,000 in takings.
The Motion Picture News of July-Sep. 1927 reported that, “There is a rumor out to the effect that Jack Fugazy’s theater on West Houston Street may have to be torn down to make way for the subway in the section.”
That rumor was true. The cause of the Fugazy Theater’s early demise was the extension of Sixth Avenue south from Carmine Street for the new Independent subway and the approach to the new Holland Tunnel. (This also killed off the Carmine Theater—see, WestView News, May, 2015.)
Hancock Street was right in the path of the planned route for Sixth Avenue. The New York Times reported on September 19, 1926 that the extension would require 10,000 people to find new homes. It would be the biggest street opening in the City’s history.
The City had acquired the land it needed on August 1, 1926, through condemnation. “Hancock Street, undoubtedly named for the signer of the Declaration of Independence, will be swallowed up in a single gulp,” added the writer. The City granted residents two thirty-day extensions from eviction, foregoing rent, but gave the largely Italian community no help in finding new places to live and work. City Comptroller Charles W. Berry said, “The exodus from Little Italy is proceeding satisfactorily.”
The Times writer concluded with this observation: “It looks as if the old quiet days of street games and neighborhood gossip are over. The future of the district looms with warehouses and factories and the ceaseless roar of rolling trucks.”
So who was Hubert J. Fugazy? He was a well-known boxing promoter who dabbled in the arts. He lived in Chelsea. Born in 1885, he had a short career in the ring under the name Jack Lee, before he turned to promoting fights. His father, Louis, born in Genoa, Italy, made his fortune in New York as a private banker.
Hubert, possibly named after Italy’s King Hubert, also owned a National Football League team called the Brooklyn Horsemen-Lions, another short-lived venture lasting only the year 1926. His nephew William, better known as Bill, became head of Fugazy Transportation and a man-about-town. Fugazy limousines still operate in New York City.
Yet another short-lived venture was Hubert’s purchase of the New York Hippodrome in 1934, with the intent of bringing opera to the masses. That one never got off the ground.
And who was William F. Passannante? He was a lifelong Villager, and a New York State Assemblyman who represented the 64th Assembly District, which included his longtime neighborhood of Greenwich Village as well as the Chelsea section of Manhattan, for thirty-six years.
Sources:
Miller, T., “Greenwich Village And How It Got That Way”, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1990.
Cinematreasures.org. (Contributor: Damien Farley.)
Forgotten New York (a program of the Greater Astoria Historical Society).
The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle Archives.
Motion Picture News Archives.
New York Times Archives.
New York Tribune Archives.
