Documentaries-only Movie Theater Is Coming to Lower Manhattan

In front of the DCTV firehouse on Lafayette Street, a variety of officials gathered with Jon Alpert, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock for a photo-op groundbreaking, in celebration of a documentary movie theater planned for the building. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Tribeca is getting a movie theater just for documentaries.

DCTV, the documentary film and education center located in the 1896 landmark former firehouse at Lafayette and White Streets, will begin construction in the next few months on the 73-seat digital theater, which will provide theatrical runs for non-fiction filmmakers and their audiences. The $2.5 million theater, the first of its kind in New York City, is expected to open in early 2015.

"We want to build a place where documentaries are celebrated—a theater devoted to all documentaries all the time," DCTV co-founder and co-director Jon Alpert said at a ceremony on May 7.  

Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the documentary "Super Size Me," called the ceremonial groundbreaking event "a banner day" for documentary filmmaking.

"Starting in a couple of years, documentary filmmakers will no longer have to worry about competing against the…'Lord of the Rings' and 'Hobbits," Spurlock told the crowd. "Finally, there's a place where only documentary films can be shown."

Plans for the new theater began in 2006, when DCTV received an $800,000 grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.  Since then the project has slowly raised funds from pubic and private sources. (The original design went before the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2009.)

Designed by Paul Alter of Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership, the theater will occupy a one-story former barn in the rear of the building, originally built for the horses that pulled fire wagons. DCTV, which serves more 13,000 students and media artists annually with its classes and production facilities, said it expects to attract 20,000 attendees in the theater's first year and "millions more online."

Documentary producer and director Michael Moore told the gathering that he hoped the new theater would be the "Johnny Appleseed" of a new movement, with documentary theaters sprouting across the country.

"The public likes non-fiction, but in film it's been treated as some sort of weird cousin," Moore said. "We need truth during these times more than ever."