Brown out at Boukies

There's noticeable work taking place at the former Heartbreak Cafe on the southwest corner of Second Street and Second Avenue... Workers recently painted the exterior from that red ...

to this...

[Bobby Williams]

Owner Christos (Pylos) Valtzoglou is planning on opening a place called Boukies that will specialize in small plates of Greek food

Many years back, the address here was home to The Second Avenue Theatre, later the Molly Picon, a Yiddish-language playhouse built in 1911. This info is via the invaluable New York Songlines. As the site notes, Walter Matthau got his start playing bit parts here.

For more information, we turn to Cinema Treasures. "David Kessler’s 2nd Avenue Theatre opened on September 14, 1911 and was the first of the Yiddish theatres to open along the 'Rialto.'" In 1958, the theatre went dark and was demolished for a parking lot.

Here's a photo of the theatre in its heyday via a Cinema Treasures reader.

For more on Yiddish theatre along lower Second Avenue ... visit The Villager here ... and here.