New York is a graveyard of former theater houses, and in recent years these vacant venues have been repurposed into retail shops, boutique hotels, a workout studio, and even a Starbucks.
So why not a one-time dramatic stock and vaudeville theater transformed into a church?
A Pentecostal Christian congregation currently occupies what was once the Mount Morris Theatre, a three-story brick, white granite, and terra cotta beauty on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 116th Street.
Originally constructed with 1,500 audience seats and designed by the firm Hoppin & Koen, this vaudeville palace was built by the Ancient Order of Hibernians as a business venture.
Day-to-day operations were turned over to a subcontractor called the Fifth Avenue Amusement Company, which would be in charge of presenting “bills of moving pictures and vaudeville acts,” the New York Times reported in 1913, the year the Mount Morris opened.
With its three-door entryway, decorative wreaths, and the series of lion heads with open mouths designed to hold the marquee, the Mount Morris—built four blocks south of Mount Morris Park—suggests grandeur.
It took its name from an earlier Mount Morris Theatre put up in the late 19th century at Third Avenue and 130th Street. By the early 1900s, this theater—originally planned to be Harlem’s version of the Grand Opera House on Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street—had shut its doors.
Judging by its first bookings, the new Mount Morris featured pretty standard soapy fare. Opening night on May 19, 1913 featured the 1912 play, “A Butterfly on the Wheel,” which is about “marriage, fidelity, and circumstantial evidence.”
At the time, Harlem was undergoing a demographic shift. Beginning in the late 19th century, East Harlem began filling up with Italian immigrants.
Meanwhile, Central Harlem was home to a Jewish immigrant community. With potential patrons nearby, theater operators rented it out to a pioneering rabbi who hosted lectures about world events.
“During its early years, the theater was often used on the weekends by a synagogue founded in 1917 by a young Orthodox rabbi, Herbert S. Goldstein, known as a maverick in his community,” wrote The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association.
Some sources describe the Mount Morris as a Yiddish theater, and the third photo above might bear this out. On the far right end of the photo appears to be an ad with Hebrew letters.
A young future star who lived in Jewish Harlem got his entertainment start at the Mount Morris Theatre.
Five-year-old Milton Berle (then known as Mendel Berlinger, fifth photo) lived at 68 West 118th Street, according to Harlem World Magazine.
His mother entered Milton in an amateur contest at the theater, where he won first prize—two dollars—for his imitation of Charlie Chaplin, according to one 1942 news story. The rest, of course, is showbiz history.
The demographic shift in the early decades of the 20th century brought African American audiences as well as many Spanish-speaking New Yorkers in East Harlem, now renamed Spanish Harlem.
In the 1930s, the Mount Morris Theatre became the Hispano, a movie house dedicated to Spanish-language films, according to a 1991 New York Times column.
The theater “screened Spanish-language films and operated under several names, including Teatro Hispano, Cervantes, Teatro Santurce, and Campoamor,” noted Harlem World Magazine.
The shift from theater to church occurred decades later, according to Harlem World. “Sometime in the 1970s, the property was acquired by The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, which continues to occupy the building today.”
The interior of the imposing structure has been altered, added Harlem World.
But with the original facade largely intact, its roots as a neighborhood stage and movie house harken back to an era in New York when similar theaters dominated the streetscape.
[Third image: The Wall Street Journal; fourth image: Cinema Treasures; sixth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]