By early 1911, Houston Hippodrome offered two (!) new plays per week. In the fall of 1910, Steiner and Minsky decided to add three-act melodramas to the bill – initially only during day-time, but later also on weekday nights. Initially, a show at the Houston Hippodrome contained a mix of short movies, comic sketches, dramatic scenes, one-act plays, songs and dances, perhaps with an additional animal act, juggler or acrobat.
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Steuer was the trial lawyer who had successfully defended the owners of the Triangle Waist Company from manslaughter charges after a factory fire killed 146 garment workers, many of them young Jewish women. Noteworthy: Minsky’s business partner in this property development was, again, a man whose reputation on the East Side was pretty bad. David Kessler had already left the Bowery for Second Avenue in 1911. Steuer, develop the million-dollar National Theatre at 111 East Houston Street, only two blocks west of the Houston Hippodrome. Two years later, Louis Minsky would, with Max D. In a way, its opening marked the beginning of the new Yiddish theatre district on Second Avenue. The new music hall was an instant success.
For five cents in the afternoon and ten cents at night, patrons were promised the best moving pictures, which alternated with vaudeville acts in Yiddish and English. On December 3, 1909, the opening of their “Houston Hippodrome” was announced in the Yiddish press. Over the next few years, the racks that once held hymnals would be frequently used for storing the bagels, salamis, knishes, and other snacks that audiences brought with them to eat during the show. Steiner and Minsky kept the old wooden church pews, which could easily seat up to 450 people. The walls were painted, the pulpit gave way to a small stage, and the organ loft became the projection booth. With a couple of minor alterations, the former church was converted into a vaudeville and moving picture theatre. The legal documents reveal that he was not very picky about his partners: financial backing came from the notorious “kosher chicken czar” and Tammany District leader Martin Engel, who owned several brothels and concert saloons in downtown Manhattan. Yet in the end, Louis Minsky bought the property for the nice sum of $96,000 (the equivalent of $2,600,000 today). Perhaps he also felt a little uncomfortable about turning a church into a theatre. At the same time, as a devout Jew and prominent member of the Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, he was not particularly thrilled by the idea of setting up his son in the entertainment business. There were few lots of this size on the market and if the new theatre was a success, he could resell it at a profit. Pa Minsky must have immediately recognized that the old church was an excellent real estate investment. Louis Minsky had made a fortune in dry goods and real estate.
Now, Abe Minsky did not have a penny to his name, as he loved gambling and womanizing a little too much. This friend happened to be Abraham Minsky (1882-1949), the oldest of the legendary Minsky burlesque brothers. Steiner discovered that an old Protestant church on East Houston Street was for sale and suggested to a friend that if they could raise the money to buy the building, they “could take a stab” at the booming Yiddish music hall business. But the location was not ideal, so he was looking for a better opportunity. “Charlie” was good at it, and a few months later he had saved enough money to open another picture show in a former kosher sausage factory on Monroe Street.
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In 1908, he had gone into the film exhibition business by turning his father’s livery stable on Essex Street into a five-cent movie theatre. The story of the Sunshine Theatre begins with an ambitious young Hungarian-Jewish immigrant, Charles Steiner (1883-1946). For over a century, it functioned as a neighborhood cornerstone: first as a church for Dutch settlers and German immigrants, then as a Yiddish music hall, and finally as a movie theatre, where Jewish and Italian newcomers watched the latest talking pictures. I know its history by heart, as I wrote part of my PhD dissertation on the place. On every visit to New York City, I would enjoy a movie at the renovated Sunshine.
Worse yet: the building’s new owners plan to demolish the historic movie theater, which reopened in 2001 after a $12 million renovation by the Landmark Theatre Corp. A few weeks ago, a journalist from the New York Times informed me that the Sunshine Cinema at 143 East Houston Street would go dark for good.
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