Meet the Neighbors: Landmark's Sunshine Cinema

Our "Meet the Neighbors" series continues this week with an introduction to Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, which has a surprising history.

The Sunshine Theater c.1930
Image Courtesy the NY Public Library


Located at East Houston and Forsyth Streets, Sunshine Cinema has been a much-loved venue for independent and foreign films for ten years. What's surprising is that the building itself has actually been a neighborhood gathering place since before the advent of cinema.

Originally built as a Dutch Reformed church in the 19th century, the building at 143 East Houston Street has had many lives. In 1908 it began a career in show biz when it was transformed into the Houston Hippodrome, a neighborhood vaudeville house featuring three-act plays, costume operettas and variety acts for local Yiddish-speaking audiences. Patrons purchased knishes from Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery down the block to snack on during a performance.
 

For Lower East Siders, Yiddish Theater was a cornerstone of neighborhood life.  Jewish American singers like Sophie Tucker and Belle Baker were known as vaudeville's "Red Hot Mamas". They rose to stardom singing ragtime and torch songs like "My Yiddishe Mama" and Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies"--but it wasn't all 'schmaltz'. The red hot mamas also delivered risque and humorous numbers like "Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love," and "Last of the Red Hot Mamas".

 

Sophie Tucker c.1913





Belle Baker c.1916

 



 


 

 

Time marched on and vaudeville's heyday ended. For nearly half a century, the auditorium was used as warehouse space for Semel Goldman Hardware. For a time in the mid-1990s, it was rented out for sporadic independent rock concerts, before Landmark Theatres bought and renovated the building. On December 21, 2001, Landmark opened its modern, five-screen art house behind the Sunshine's classic façade.

Sunshine Cinema today

But the more things change, the more they stay the same: with the return of theater audiences, the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery is once again selling their famous knishes to moviegoers. Pick one up the next time you head to the movies for a taste of the vaudeville era and the original Jewish Lower East Side!

A Knish Speaks

Today, our guestblogger, journalist Laura Silver, shares her recent adventures with knishes.

In 1908 when Abraham Goldfaden, the father of Yiddish theater, died, The New York Times reported a funeral procession of 75,000. In 1926 two thousand mourners crowded Kessler’s Second Avenue Theater to pay respects to Jacob P. Adler, a great of the Yiddish stage.

On Sunday, October 10, 2010, there were 10 of us: Jews, Catholics, New Yorkers, Canadians, a friend from Boston, a Yiddish enthusiast from the Bronx and two women from St. Marks Place. All gathered for a solemn processional on Second Avenue to call attention for the oft-overlooked landmarks of the Yiddish Theater.

Knish Alley Revival, part of the Conflux Festival, stepped off a few minutes after 4:00 p.m. from Abe Lebewohl Park, on the northwest corner of East 10th Street and Second Avenue.

Clad in a foam knish costume (yours truly), a yellow raincoat and headband of “Caution" tape (the Bronx Yiddishist), transparent yellow raincoats, sun-colored hair clips, scarves and bracelets, we marched northward, past the historical signs on the church fence to the Village East Cineplex. We entered and bowed to the plaque honoring Jewish actors who graced the building’s stage from 1926 to the 1940s, when the strip from 14th Street to Houston was known as the Yiddish Rialto, or Knish Alley, thanks to then-ubiquitous dairy restaurants.

We crossed Second Avenue, proceeded downtown to the Yiddish Walk of Fame in front of the Chase Bank that was the 2nd Avenue Deli until early 2006, and stopped to read names like Molly Picon, Abraham Goldfaden, Jacob P. Adler, and Fyvush Finkel, whose eponymous show at the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater just opened on Thursday, October 17 on Lexington Avenue.

For me the next act is continuing work on The Book of Knish: Loss, Longing and the Search for a Humble Hunk of Dough and a Kickstarter campaign that continues through November 1.

Questions for Curatorial - Yiddish on the LES

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Were the dialects of Yiddish spoken on the Lower East Side during the turn of the last century mutually intelligible? For example, if they have lived at 97 Orchard Street at the same time, could the Polish Levine and Lithuanian Rogarshevsky families have understood one another?

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side hailed from a number of different regions, among them Hungary, Galicia, Rumania, and Russia. Although the "eastern Yiddish" dialect spoken by people from each of these regions evinced a shared linguistic heritage, their “Lithuanian,” “Polish,” and “Ukrainian” sub-dialects differed substantially from one another in vocabulary and grammar, as well as in the pronunciation of certain vowels.

A language “always in a rapid process of growth and dissolution,” the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants was further transformed by the encounter with America. The historian Irving Howe writes, “A whole sublanguage or patois grew up in the immigrant districts, neither quite English nor quite Yiddish, in which the vocabulary of the former was twisted to the syntax of the latter.”

It is possible, therefore, that while Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Poland (like the Levines) may have experienced some immediate difficulty in communicating with Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Lithuania, a shared linguistic heritage and an increasing overlap between Yiddish and American English appears to have narrowed this linguistic divide.

A Bit of East Village History

Like the Tenement Museum, the East Village History Project, a nonprofit affiliated with the East Village Visitor's Center, charts how lower Manhattan's social and physical fabric evolved since the 19th century. I browsed the organization's blog the other day, and came across some interesting historical tidbits:

In 1805, when development was still concentrated on the city's southern tip, a garden sat just south of Astor Place, covering four blocks between Bowery and Broadway. It was owned by John Jacob Astor himself, and designed with Manhattan's wealthy in mind. "Gravel walks wound through the garden's finely landscaped lawns and flowerbeds; marble statues stood in shady alcoves; an outdoor theater offered bland entertainments, and farmland stretched off to the north as far as the eye could see."


East Village Cinemas on Second Avenue is one of the only former Yiddish theaters still standing on Second Avenue

One avenue to the east and about a century later, Eastern European Jewish culture flourished along what was known as "Yiddish Broadway." Few traces remain of the ornate theaters that lined Second Avenue, including the 2,000-seat National Theater - but 50 plaques inscribed with famous Yiddish actors' names still grace the sidewalk outside the former Second Avenue Deli (now a Chase Bank.)

-posted by Liana Grey