Bare Beams and Steel: A Look Inside the Planned Renovation of the UWS’s Former Metro Theater

By Noëlle de Leeuw

On Saturday afternoon, a group of Upper West Siders donned hard hats outside the Uptown Film Center on Broadway, between West 99th and 100th streets. They had come for a tour of the former Metro theater, closed for two decades, now being renovated into a new multi-screen complex.

“There’s going to be no surprises to you, because we’re down to the studs,” Ira Deutchman, a leader of the nonprofit reviving the old theater, told the group. “You know, a lot of times when they talk about renovations of an old building, you constantly hear from folks: ‘Once you get into the walls, you never know what you’re going to find.’ Well, there’s nothing here that can be hidden.”

True to Deutchman’s description, as we stood in what will eventually be the complex’s café, we were surrounded by nothing but bare beams and structural steel. Deutchman led the group onward, joined by Beth Krieger and Adeline Monzier, his colleagues from the nonprofit Upper West Side Cinema Center.

The center is currently wrapping up what is called the schematic stage: the process of developing preliminary drawings for the project, which have been months in the works. Up next is taking these detailed plans and carefully budgeting it all out. “And then, of course,” Deutchman said, “we’ll start cutting things.”

It’s hard to imagine, looking at this stripped, empty space, that Deutchman is standing in what will be the doorway of the center’s second screen. The space is bare now, but will have four floors and five screens, including one that will be able to project 35mm and 70mm film in addition to digital projection. One of the five theaters will be used as an education center, and there will be a café in the lobby. Right now, if you look closely at a hole in the concrete floor, you can peek at what will become the film center’s basement.

The total cost of the project, including the purchase of the building, is $36 million. As of now, the nonprofit is about $23 million away from that goal, according to Deutchman. The group hopes to break ground in 14 months, and, if all goes according to plan, open to the film-going public in November 2028.

That opening would complete the comeback of an institution that has been around for close to a century. The theater first opened in 1933 as the Midtown Theater, and the art deco landmark has lived many lives since, from arthouse theater to adult movie house, under the names Metro Theater, the Cineplex Odeon Metro Twin, the Embassy’s New Metro Twin. Through all the changes, the theater always had just one screen. It closed in 2005 and has been shuttered ever since, the interior demolished.

Little traces of what once was have emerged in recent months: a broken film reel that had been collecting dust for 20 years, or the letter M from the façade. Long believed to be lost, the M turned out to have been upstairs, out of sight, for all those years. In one corner, a small strip of disco-mirrored wallpaper still glistens. “I’m guessing that’s a leftover from the Cineplex Odeon era,” Deutchman deadpanned, “because those guys had no taste.”

The Uptown Film Center has thus far received generous government support, with a $3.5 million grant from Governor Kathy Hochul and $500,000 from the New York State Senate. “This is a neighborhood project as much as it is an arts project,” Krieger said, describing the theater as not just a cultural investment, but also a project that can help reinvigorate the neighborhood’s commercial life.

Krieger explained how the plan for the Uptown Film Center is to become a membership-based theater, much like Film at Lincoln Center or Film Forum. The latter is also a good representation of the kind of programming to expect.

“It kills us to see all the great movies coming out now, because we can’t show them,” Krieger said. For now, the nonprofit is offering pop-up film series, such as Tales of the Immigrant City, currently at the New York Historical and Science on Screen at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater. This summer, too, screenings of repertory films are in the pipeline. Consider it a taste of what’s to come. “We’re keeping tickets very reasonable,” Krieger said, “but we wanted to show what we intend on doing.”

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