Metro Theater Deal: NonProfit Seeks to Raise $7 Mil to Revive It as Art Film House

The show may finally go on for the Metro Theater on the Upper West Side.

Upper West Side Cinema Center, a nonprofit group, has an agreement with the estate of the theater’s former owner, Albert Bialek, who died in 2023, to buy the landmarked building on Broadway near W. 99th St.

But first it needs to raise the final one third of the $7 million purchase price. Once that deal closes, the hope is to turn the beloved landmarked building that has been closed for nearly two decades into an art house film center complete with an education center for middle and high school kids.

“The vision is a five-screen, not for profit art house,” said UWSCC President/Treasurer Ira Deutchman, an indie film producer who joined with French-born film consultant Adeline Monzier, to head up the not for profit group. “We want it to be a welcoming place for the community and an anchor which the neighborhood really sorely needs,” Deutchman said.

Borough president Mark Levine is on board with the plan. “After decades of vacancy, a deal has been reached to sell the beloved Metro Theater, art deco jewel on the UWS,” he posted on X. “They need help raising money for the purchase. More info on this exciting project: https://uwscinema.org.”

In its colorful past, the site has been everything from a seven-story apartment building to a first-run movie house from 1933 when it was known as the Midtown Theater to the 1970s and early 1980s when it was converted into a porn film house.

Dan Talbot, the indie film champion who prior to his death also owned the Lincoln Plaza Cinema leased the building in 1982 and turned it into an art film house and an outlet for foreign films. Movie chain Cineplex took over the theater’s lease in 1987 and sold it to Cablevision, the then-parent company of Clearview Cinemas, in 1998. Peter H. Elson, renovated the theater in 2004 and ran it for a year, before he ran short of funds and the Metro was padlocked in November 2005 and gutted the next year.

Bialek, unsuccessfully attempted to lease out the theater in the late 2000s and the 2010s to a slew of potential tenants including Urban Outfitters, Wingspan Arts, Planet Fitness, and Blink Fitness.

Its last bid at a comeback came in 2022 when a local group largely funded by Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas, which tried to buy it in 2014, took over the theater with a second bid to turn it into a dine in theater venue. Those plans were canceled in 2024.

Once the new not-for-profit owners have secured the funds to finalize the purchase of the building, the plan is to eventualy raise between $15 and $25 million to restore the pink terra-cotta Art Deco facade and marquee and build a five-screen cinema inside complete with an education center as a resource for middle and high school classes.

The five screens, Deutchman explained, include one for “repertory films, restored classic films, festivals and events,” one dedicated to first-run arthouse films, two to extending runs from other theaters, and one called the Education Center.

“It’s really about bringing the best of what film education and film literacy can give to this cinema and making it a unique space for that as well in the New York City landscape,” said Monzier, who is the UWSCC Vice President who will head the planned educational programming.

She talked about how when she grew up in France, she would go on regular field trips to movies—something she is surprised does not happen in the United States. The goal with the Metro Theater’s Education Center would be to encourage schools to see film as more than just a form of fun entertainment.

“Film is one of the most accessible art forms,” said Monzier. “It really has the power to unify, to educate, to inspire, to trigger empathy.”

“We’re living through an age where kids are having a really tough time, between their addiction to social media, and having gone through the pandemic,” Deutchman said. “I think there’s a whole generation of kids who don’t know how to socialize with other people, and the idea of getting them into a communal space to experience something together and then have the opportunity to talk about it, for me, is something that is hardly elitist,” Deutchman said. “This is about, creating an ability for this generation to actually figure out how being with other people can be so productive.”

“There are the student screenings with Q&As, which are aligned with cinema programming...If we open a film and we think it’s a good fit for middle school or high school, then we [will be able to] offer it to the school and bring the filmmaker to have a discussion with the students,” said Monzier. “ We would love to work directly with teachers to see if we can create curriculum aligned screenings, so create film slates that could be integrated into various academic subjects.”

Over the years, past restoration plans were always complicated according to the New York Times, because Bialek had already sold air rights to the building and development options were further limited because of the theater’s landmark status. So far the new owners have secured about one third of the funding they need to buy the building, the prospective owners told the Times.

“We have everything queued up and ready to go,” said Deutchman. “Once we have access to the building on a full time basis, we’re going to immediately flip into the mode of gathering the necessary resources to do the build out that’s also going to include government support, which we’ve already been assured, can potentially be there and and then to as quickly as possible break ground and start this thing going.”

“We can tell now that there is a lot of enthusiasm and and love for the project,” he said.