Jackson Heights Life

Stumbled upon this blog post on the site Cinema Treasures. Wish I would have known that they were selling off parts of the interior via an ad on craigslist. Would have been nice to have a final look around...

http://iwantmorefood.com/2010/02/12/eagle-theater-dismemberment/

Here's a shot of the Earle from 1987. This same site also has pics of The Colony, Jackson, Boulevard and Elmwood.

http://americanclassicimages.com/Default.aspx?tabid=141&txtSearch=CATAdvancedSearch1%2c-1%2c3%2c1424&ProductID=30836

This should be criminal.  Breaks my heart. 

Does anyone know what the owners are planning on doing with the space?  Did I miss that somewhere.  My apologies if I did.

One question:  knowing what type of theater the Eagle/Earle became in the 80s, I can't imagine that anyone would want the seats. 

Yeah I don't think I'd want them even if they were professionally cleaned and fumigated... I can't figure out the seat situation. The bottom seat pic in the bloggers post is newer than the pic of the interior seats in another pic. I wonder if they replaced a section of seats, possibly in the walk up balcony?

Hey, it was a sample seat from some manufacturer. It was up in the projectionists room. It was crazy taking it down the metal stairway to the opening below. No lights in the hallway, one of the workers from the kebab king used his cellphone for light at some points.
yes, It's probably better I didn't get a row of seats, considering waht the theater used to be, but to their credit - the seats didn't look in such terrible condition. This lead to some discussions among my friends about which seats would be the best to take if this were the case. The ones I originally had in mind were in the front row. I posed that these were probably not used much. Also, let me just say that it must be a huge theater for a porn theater.

Hey, it was a sample seat from some manufacturer. It was up in the projectionists room. It was crazy taking it down the metal stairway to the opening below. No lights in the hallway, one of the workers from the kebab king used his cellphone for light at some points.
yes, It's probably better I didn't get a row of seats, considering waht the theater used to be, but to their credit - the seats didn't look in such terrible condition. This lead to some discussions among my friends about which seats would be the best to take if this were the case. The ones I originally had in mind were in the front row. I posed that these were probably not used much. Also, let me just say that it must be a huge theater for a porn theater.

I don't know about the front theory ... though I admit naivety about that theater, I just think any seat at one time or another during its racier time frame may have been ... um, tagged?

Also, let me just say that it must be a huge theater for a porn theater.

The Earle was probably the biggest in terms of seats (1294) in Queens. Across the city and country many old movie palaces became porn theaters. The Shore Theater in Coney Island has 2300 seats and many of the theaters along 42st had similar capacity. It's hard to believe that these theaters did the switchover but "legit" movie attendance was down, so this became somewhat of a survival necessity back in those days.

Also, before the advent of videotape (and then DVDs and then the Internet), I imagine that in 70s and 80s it was the only way to get porn not in a plain brown wrapper.  Granted I was too young to know

70's for sure, 80's they became huge in the video rental market since most of the tapes back then were priced from $80-$100 each. I'm trying to recall how many years The Earle sat empty until it became The Eagle (if at all)?