Building of the Day: 1298 Fulton Street

Brooklyn, one building at a time.

Name: Former Fulton Auditorium, then Banco Theater, now retail stores
Address: 1298 Fulton Street
Cross Streets: Nostrand and New York Avenues
Neighborhood: Bedford Stuyvesant
Year Built: 1908; rebuilt in 1913 as motion picture theater
Architectural Style: Turn-of-the-20th-century theater
Architect: Original architect unknown. 1913 rebuild, James Boyle
Landmarked: No

The story: When I moved to Bedford Stuyvesant in 1983, this building was a butcher shop and grocery. I always knew it had been a theater of some sort, because when you went into the store, the floor was raked, that is pitched on an angle, downwards the back to the store. The front of the store, which would have been the back of the theater, where the seating was, was filled with grocery items. As you walked towards the back of the store, or the front of the house, where the stage and screen used to be, the elevation got lower and lower. It was not raked steeply enough to affect placement of merchandise or displays, but it was quite noticeable.

About where the stage would have been, the owners had hung those long, foot wide heavy clear plastic divider curtain things, and you had to move it out of the way to get to the meat department, which was the original stage area, and was a permanently refrigerated room. It was really cold back there, and that’s where they would cut meat, grind hamburger, and lay out all of the cuts of meat and poultry. They were there for years, and then one day, they were gone. The building was renovated as a clothing store, and later, subdivided into two long narrow clothing stores, both owned by the same company.

I was always curious as to what kind of theater the building had been, and when. Much later, when I became an avid researcher into this neighborhood, I learned that Fulton Street, along much of its route from Downtown, on through Bedford Stuyvesant, had been filled not only with stores and businesses, but also a lot of entertainment venues, including theaters, entertainment and lecture halls, bowling alleys and roller rinks. They are all gone now, and only a few of the buildings themselves remain, their original uses long forgotten.

1298 was home to an entertainment hall as far back as 1882. It was called Cleveland Hall, and was not a theater, but a hall that could be rented out for lectures, dances, concerts and meeting space. A notice in the Eagle in 1898 mentions that the Cleveland Hall was the location for a series of sight-singing classes, where people could learn to read music. By 1908, Cleveland hall had been torn down, and this theater building was built, and called the Fulton Auditorium. In 1913, local architect James Boyle was contracted to expand and alter the building to turn it into a motion picture house.

The first motion pictures shown here were silent films, most likely accompanied by a piano, small organ, or two or three musicians. There would not have been room for much of an orchestra. In 1917, the Fulton Auditorium Company was sued by the Broadway Musical Corporation because a song called “Down Where the Suanee River Flows” was being played there without paying royalties to the publishers. The publishers were going after every theater and vaudeville house in Brooklyn to find out who was playing their song, and they planned on filing multiple suits. There were a lot of theaters and vaudeville houses.

The theater is mentioned in scores of listings in the Eagle, as they played very popular movies made by the stars of the day, including Rudolf Valentino, Buster Keaton, Lon Chaney, cowboy action heroes William and Frank Farney, Jackie Coogan and more. They did not have a reputation for being the best theatre in the area, but were popular and inexpensive. Later records show that in the 1930s, a new marquee was erected, and then taken down.

In 1948, the theater became the Banco Theater, with a new marquee. Their first films under that name were a double feature of “The Kiss of Death” and “The Cisco Kid.” They showed second run features, and also movies that appealed to the African American community, which was becoming the majority of the population of the area. They had a first showing in Brooklyn of the movie, “Strange Victory,” which was about racial bias in the U.S. after World War II.

The Banco remained a neighborhood movie theater until 1976, when it closed. During their last years, the theater survived by playing a lot of popular “Blaxploitation” films, such as the one featured on the marquee in the American Classic Images photograph from the early 70s. This picture is the only one available that shows the building as a theater. Note the eagle on the top of the roof, which is long gone.

The pressed metal cresting on the roof remained when the building was a butcher shop/supermarket, and through its first retail incarnation, as shown in the 2006 photo. Most of it may still be under the flexible signage. When the building became a clothing store, the owners graded the floor to an even height. Sometime in 2008, the store was further subdivided into two retail spaces.

I’m glad I found out the building’s history. Bedford Stuyvesant lost all of its movie theaters, as did most of working class Brooklyn, in the 1970s. Many of the buildings are still standing, now churches and stores. It would be great to see some returned to their original function, should they become available once again. GMAP

(Photo: Christopher Bride for PropertyShark)