Yeah, its recent long tortured history (condo! restuarant!) is over. It will now be home to an Urban Outfitters. (New York Post, second item). Finally, local residents won't have to travel so far for their Toddland diver down hoodies!
City Room had an item on the Metro (originally called the Midtown, for some reason) in 2007:
From the outside, the landmark Metro Theater on Broadway, an Art Deco jewel box between 99th and 100th Streets, looks almost as exquisite as it must have in the 1930s, when movies were still known as “photoplays,” though no photo has played there for two years.
But the inside, visible to passers-by on a recent afternoon, has been gutted. Gone are seats and plaster and curtains and screen. Gone is a golden ceiling molding with a chain of floral bouquets. Gone are the sylph-filled niches. Gone is grillework that sprouted like corn stalks.
Here's a little more on the theater's past on Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture
The Midtown, designed by the architecture firm of Boak & Paris, opened in 1933. From 1948 through April 1972, it was part of the Brandt circuit, featuring sub-run foreign and independent fare starting in the 1950s. It exhibited films such as Belle de Jour, Shame (and just about every other Bergman movie), Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Repulsion, L’Avventura, Straw Dogs, and Gimme Shelter, though never in exclusive engagements. After Brandt's management, it operated as an adult film venue.
It was renamed the Metro in 1982.
