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Tribeca’s Screening, It’s Now Curtains
by Etta Sanders
Like a scene out of “The Last Picture Show.” Tribeca’s Screening
Room has gone dark.
Late last month, the seven-year-old Screening Room closed, and the marquee,
which had long announced Sunday screenings of “Breakfast at Tiffanys,”
read, simply, “All Farewells Should Be Sudden.” A handwritten
note on the locked door said, “Gone fishing for good (Probably). Thanks
for all your support.”
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A sale of the the restaurant-theater, at Varick and Laight streets,
is pending. The deal will give Tribeca a bigger restaurant, but
it brings to an end the only movie house the neighborhood can call
its own.
Word of the theater’s impending demise first leaked out at
a meeting early last month of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee.
The prospective buyers came for, and received, the board’s
advisory approval for a transfer of the property’s liquor license.
Robert Schagrin, one of the three applicants, told the committee
that he and his partners intend to expand the 152-seat restaurant
and keep one of the two movie theaters, but only for private screenings.
One partner, Michael Trenk, is director of Drew Nieporent’s
Icon restaurant on East 39th Street.
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The news came as a surprise to the community board members. “It
was certainly a disappointment to me, and even more to my children,
that the Screening Room was going out of business,” said Michael
Connolly, who lives on North Moore Street. “It will be sorely
missed.”
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The small, independent theater opened in the summer of 1996,
specializing in art films and documentaries. With its adjacent
restaurant, it offered the complete date: dinner and a movie
for a single price.
Co-owner Henry Hershkowitz declined to comment, but like other
Downtown businesses, the Screening Room struggled after Sept.
11. In an article in Crain’s New York Business in June
2003, Hershkowitz said that competition from the Landmark
Sunshine on Houston Street also hurt their business.
“When we opened seven years ago, there were less theaters
Downtown,” he told Crain’s. “It’s always
been difficult, but the Sunshine has made it much more difficult.”
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Hershkowitz, a former lawyer, and his partner Steven Kantor, a business-school
graduate, were both 29 and disaffected from the corporate world when
they opened the Screening Room.
Miriam Wysoker, who lives a few blocks from the theater, said she
lovedhaving the Screening Room nearby and liked the movies they show.
But she noticed that when she went in the afternoon or early evenings,
there were few other customers. “ I can’t see how it could
have stayed in business,” she said.
The Screening Room’s demise comes on the heels of the closing
of five of the 16 screens in Battery Park City’s Regal Cinemas.
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