History

Loew’s Theatres entered 1929 with an ambition to build five major picture palaces simultaneously—one each in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Upper Manhattan—at a moment when the picture palace format was at its commercial peak and before the Depression would end that era of investment. The brief was explicit: theaters as large and as opulent as anything in Broadway or Times Square, sited in the residential neighborhoods of the outer boroughs and New Jersey where working-class audiences lived and where the transit infrastructure could deliver them cheaply.

Rapp & Rapp received the commission for the Kings and Jersey City buildings. The Kings on Flatbush Avenue was the flagship of Brooklyn’s entertainment corridor—a neighborhood that had developed rapidly through the 1920s as subway lines connected it to Manhattan. The theater’s exterior, with its Flatbush Avenue facade of white terra cotta, signaled its ambitions before audiences entered. Inside, the lobby and auditorium deployed French Baroque ornament on the scale of state architecture: coffered ceilings, gilded plasterwork, colonnaded balconies, and a proscenium arch scaled to a 3,200-person house.

The Kings ran first-run Hollywood films through the 1940s and 1950s. As Flatbush declined through the 1960s—white flight, urban disinvestment, the suburban migration of its original audience—the theater struggled to maintain programming. It closed in 1977 and was subsequently vandalized and deteriorated through exposure. For 38 years the Kings sat empty, a spectacular ruin on Flatbush Avenue. The city and a nonprofit coalition assembled funding for a $95 million restoration completed in 2015; the contractor preserved and restored original plasterwork where possible and replicated missing elements from historical records. The reopened Kings now books major touring acts and community events, returning the role the original theater played in the neighborhood.