This Thanksgiving, our Chief Experience Officer reflects on his gratitude for the play that changed his life!
This now-obscure holiday was once bigger than Thanksgiving...and the 4th of July!
Remnants of a lost Grand Central movie theater can be seen in a retail shop!
Grand Central Terminal once had a movie theater and remnants of it can be seen in the train hub today. Grand Central Theatre, which opened in 1937 (possibly earlier), showed newsreels, shorts, and cartoons. The 242-seat theater operated for three decades and then was gutted for retail. Today it’s Central Cellars wine shop next to Track 17. Previous tenants were the Grande Harvest Wine store and a photo shop. Renovations to the terminal in the 1990s revealed the ceiling, that stylistically matches the one in the main terminal, along with other historical details and ornamentations.
The first film to screen at the theater was the MGM film Servant of the People: The Story of the Constitution of the United States–one supposes Americans were a little more high-brow back then. According to the website, I Ride the Harlem Line, the theater was advertised as the “most intimate theatre in America” and was open every day until midnight.
Another fun tidbit is that the theater was designed by Tony Sarg, the same person who created the first balloons for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, including Felix the Cat! According to Johnny, a knowledgable employee at Central Cellars, Sarg was also running this movie theater and using all of his creative earnings to support it. "You might call him America's first lifestyle guru," Johnny told us in an interview. “He did covers for the Saturday Evening Post. He invented the balloons for Macy's Parade...He did textile patterns and place settings...he was a marionette builder."
Johnny believes the theater extended into what is now Grand Central Market, and that the area where the wine shop is now was both a bar and a place to screen newsreels. You can still find the projection box in the wine store today. "It's not the HVAC system," he told us. The mural is likely the last remaining from the movie theater, but there would have originally been more. "He caught the color perfectly," Johnny describes, comparing it to Grand Central's main terminal ceiling, but adds "It's not intended to be the same as it is out there. It's kind of like a fantasy space scene."
From hidden tennis courts to the remnants of a lost movie theater and an office-turned-speakeasy, uncover the secrets of New York City's iconic train terminal!
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Our latest podcast episode on this hidden mural also includes a clip from the authors of the book Tony Sarg: Adventures in Illustration, Puppetry & Popular Culture—Stephanie Plunkett and Lenore Miller—at one of our Untapped New York Insiders virtual events in 2023, in conjunction with an accompanying exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Visit this former theater site when you join us on a Secrets of Grand Central Terminal Walking tour!
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