We arrived at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas with anticipation recently to see “Darkest Hour,” a film about a newly appointed Winston Churchill confronting the threat of invasion from Nazi forces.
But we also looked forward to a film at the Lincoln Plaza, which you reach by descending a level from the box office on Broadway.
Tan carpet covers the lobby. The walls are painted lavender. One corner features a display case that holds memorabilia. There’s a concession stand that sells coffee and cake along with the candy and popcorn. An office across from the stand holds a desk and houses the management.
The six theaters themselves are throwbacks to an era before the horrors of stadium seating and moviegoers who text from their seats. The floors slope gently toward the screen. If the hallmarks of a great theater are the view and sound from the last row (where we like to sit) then the Lincoln Plaza may be the best in the city.
Happiness. At least until next month, when the Lincoln Plaza is slated to close, a victim of technology and rising rents across the city. The tale is one that recurs nowadays. “The Lincoln Plaza is the latest art house hit by a historic confluence of forces, including the streaming boom and New York gentrification,” noted Deadline, which broke the news.
Milstein Properties, which owns the building, said in a statement that “vital work” is needed to waterproof the plaza surrounding the building and that it expects “to reopen the space as a cinema that will maintain its cultural legacy far into the future.”
A spokesman for the company refused to say whether the theater would reopen with its operators, Daniel and Toby Talbot, at the helm.
If you like the Lincoln Plaza, thank the Talbots, who opened the six-screen theater in 1981. The Talbots, who are married for 68 years, have displayed independent films in the city since 1960. The theater reflects their stewardship.
“Our theater served as a springboard for a lot of foreign films,” Toby Talbot, already speaking in the past tense, told the Times, which noted that the theater introduced American audiences to such directors as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Daniel Talbot has credited colleagues for the theater’s charms. In a 2004 speech to mark his receiving an award for lifetime achievement from the Independent Filmmaker Project, Talbot thanked the theater’s programmer and “Ewnetu Admassu, the house manager of the Lincoln Plaza… who runs the theatre as if it were his home. There is nobody like him.”