GroundLinks

Summary of New York Times articles regarding the Ideal/Playpen Theater (1939 - 2007)
 

·         04/13/1937, “A Pirate’s Role by Fredric March” (name of theater at time: ESQUIRE)

“The Ideal Theatre, Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, will reopen late this month (probably April 26) as a foreign film house. It will then be known as the Esquire Theatre and for its first attraction will offer Jan Kiepura and Luli Desti in “Im Sonnenschein,” to be called “Thank You, Madame.” The house has received a new face and interior reneovations at an estimated cost of $25,000. It will be operated by Consolidated Amusement Enterprises.”

·         04/16/1937, “Three New Films On Metro Program” (ESQUIRE)

“April 26 is the definite opening date of the Esquire Theatre, new home for foreign films.”

·         04/25/1937, “From the Studio Inkpot Genii” (ESQUIRE)

“Tomorrow the Esquire Theatre opens with another of [Ms. Luli Deste’s] pictures, opposite Jan Kiepura in ‘Im Sonnenschein,’ which is being called ‘Thank You, Madame.’”

·         04/26/1937, “News of the Screen” (ESQUIRE)

“The Esquire Theatre at Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, which used to be a neighborhood theatre until Consolidated Amusement Enterprises took it over and transformed it in line with the intimate cinema motif, will open tonight with the first showing in this country of the Jan Kiepura-Luli Deste ‘Im Sonnenschein’.”

·         05/02/1937, “Reviewing the Week in Films” (ESQUIRE)

“A so-so week in films has slipped by, featured chiefly by James Cagney’s spurning of Warner overtures, by the addition of the Esquire Theatre to the roster of midtown Manhattan cinema houses. . .”

·         05/05/1937, “News of the Screen” (ESQUIRE)

“The Esquire Theatre (formerly the Ideal), which was redecorated at a cost of $25,000 and opened April 26 a a home for foreign films with ‘Thank You, Madame,’ ended its brief career last Monday night. The theatre operators, Consolidated Amusement Enterprises, announced yesterday that the Esquire would make another bid for the foreign film trade in the Fall.”

·         05/09/1937, “Film News in Review” (ESQUIRE)

“Requiem: That little haven for foreign films on Eighth Avenue near Forty-fourth Street which Consolidated Amusement Enterprises names the Esquire Theatre (old timers knew it as a grind house called the Ideal) drew down the blinds last Monday night after a brief career that started on April 26 with the Jan Kiepura-Luli Deste item, ‘Thank You, Madame.’ The house, which was refurbished inside and outside to the tune of $25,000, will remain darkened until Autumn rolls around.”

·         09/10/1937, “News of the Screen” (SQUIRE)

“Closed since last May, the Esquire Theatre, Eighth Avenue on Forty-fourth Street, will reopen tomorrow as the Squire Theatre, under the management of the Temporary Amusement Company, which has rented the house from Consolidated Amusement Enterprises for the run of three foreign production. The first will be ‘The Spanish Earth,’ which last night completed its three-week engagement at the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse.”

·         10/21/1939, “The Screen” (CAMEO)

Intro to premiere of Yiddish film, “Mirele Efros” at the Cameo.

·         11/10/1962, “ ‘Two for the Seesaw’ Opens on Nov. 21” (CAMEO)

“Today’s new film is ‘You Came Too Late,’ a Greek drama with English titles at the Cameo Theater.”

·         11/12/1962, “The Screen” (CAMEO)

Intro to premiere of “You Came Too Late” (Greek w/ English titles).

·         11/17/1962, “2 Bypassed Films To Be Shown Here” (CAMEO)

Today’s new film is ‘The Letter That Was Never Sent,’ a Russian drama with Tatiana Samoilova, at the Cameo Theater.”

·         04/08/1963, “Screen: ‘Pillar of Fire’” (CAMEO)

Intro to premier of “The Pillar of Fire,” drama of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1948.

·         05/04/1964, “Screen: Soviet ‘Othello’” (CAMEO)

Intro to Soviet-made “Ballet of Othello.”

·         04/29/1976, “On Prostitution Row, Business Hums as Mayor Talks” (CAMEO)

Cameo Theater in context of Mayor Beame’s speech at the Majestic Theater on the prostitution sweep.

·         11/12/1976, “Along 8^th Avenue, Where Leer is King . . .” (CAMEO)

Cameo Theater in context of Mayor Beame’s proposals.

·         05/18/1977, “Film: Fond Period Rite” (CAMEO)

Mentions Whitney Museum’s presentation of 1939 Yiddish film, “Mirele Efros” at the Cameo Theater, reviewed in the NYT on 21 October 1939.

·         09/12/1994, “Back in Business: Once (and Future?) King of Times Sq. Porn” (PLAYPEN)

Mentions Martin J. Hodas, owner and the King of Peeps. “Mr. Daly said that Mr. Hodas's growing new empire included the Playpen, on 43d Street near Eighth Avenue; Playworld, on Eighth Avenue opposite the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Peeporama, on 42d Street east of Seventh Avenue. And he said there were indications that Mr. Hodas might soon take over the Adonis Theater, on Eighth Avenue north of 43d Street.”

·         09/29/1997, “Metro Matters; Not Too Adult to Make Matters of Sex Stores” (PLAYPEN)

General discussion of Times Square sex shops.

·         11/28/1999, “New Yorkers & Co.: Wizards of Neon Make Their Mark on Broadway” (PLAYPEN)

Article on Krypton Neon company. “Mr. Tomasso's company, too, has constructed a striking work: the notorious 15-foot blond topless dancer on the marquee of the Playpen in Times Square.”

·         04/02/2000, “City Lore: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes” (PLAYPEN)

“MAX PAGE, a historian who teaches at Yale, was standing in the middle of Times Square the other day, but it was not the glitter and the electronic billboards that attracted him. Rather, it was the shabbier fringes of the spruced-up district, where old buildings like a gaudy adults-only theater on Eighth Avenue called the Playpen stand like relics of another age. The author of ‘The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940’ (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Mr. Page is like a man with X-ray vision.”

·         04/10/2002, “NYC; Where Have You Gone, Live Girls?” (PLAYPEN)

“It is indecent, City Hall has told us, for a woman working at the Playpen, a venerable, if dreary, establishment on Eighth Avenue, to take off her clothes for a $5 fee plus a ''suitable'' tip. But it is deemed legitimate show biz when, around the corner at the Plymouth Theater, Kathleen Turner doffs everything in ''The Graduate'' except her high heels. (With top seats going for $76.25, each full-frontal second comes to about $4. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.)”

·         06/03/1995, “NYC; Deep Throat Revealed? Redundant” (PLAYPEN)

Discussion of porn “classics”.

·         12/15/1998, “NYC; Live, Nude And O.K. With City Hall” (PLAYPEN)

Compares Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” on Broadway to the sex selling at the Playpen. “IT surely would have been, how to put it, invigorating to watch Nicole Kidman taking it all off in midtown on Sunday night. But even the blockaded City Hall is easier to get into than Ms. Kidman's newly opened Broadway show, ''The Blue Room.'' So the search for revealed truth led by default to another part of midtown, an establishment known as the Playpen.”

·         09/12/2007, “Cheesy Can Be a Lot of Fun” (PLAYPEN)

Mentions recent closing of Playpen.

All references above are from articles in The New York Times. © The New York Times.