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\n Photo: Eleanor Roosevelt\/Independent Democrats\n <\/p>\n
Jack Greenberg, in his brown Merrells, white socks, and transition glasses working overtime on an unseasonably hot Friday afternoon in October, looks the part of a movie buff. On his phone, the 25-year-old programmer has the receipts to back it up. \u201cI have all the math,\u201d he says, pulling up a spreadsheet of how many movies he has seen in his time as a member of the AMC Theatres rewards program. We\u2019re sitting at a bus stop outside the Kips Bay AMC 15, where Greenberg, according to his spreadsheet, has seen 216 movies in the past three years and three months. He has spent much of his life in the neighborhood; born at the NYU Langone\u2013owned Tisch Hospital, he now lives a few blocks from the theater. The day before, he was here to see The History of Concrete<\/a>, which he describes as a \u201cvery personal documentary about seeing one\u2019s neighborhood change.\u201d<\/p>\n He is living in a similar moment. In late August, Variety confirmed<\/a> rumors that this theater would close at the end of this year after 27 years of operation on Second Avenue. With box-office sales down<\/a> long-term, ticket prices up<\/a>, and movie theaters closing<\/a> in rapid succession since COVID, the site will be taken over by one of the actually growing industries in America: health care. NYU Langone Health, which has expanded in the tristate area by 376 percent<\/a> since 2007, is expanding a bit more, occupying the theater for what it has described<\/a> as clinical space for patient care.<\/p>\n Kips Bay is not one of the most famous neighborhoods in Manhattan; it is not visited by tourists or celebrities so much as people coming from and going to one of its many hospitals. But when residents learned of the AMC\u2019s closure, they were outraged by the encroachment of yet another medical office \u2014 and called on their elected officials to save the theater. \u201cThey\u2019re going to keep creeping into Kips Bay, and it\u2019s going to be just a boring place to live,\u201d says Greenberg.<\/p>\n At a meeting of the local community board on September 9, the neighborhood news was not well received. Jared Ian Goldman, who executive-produced the Oscar-nominated Loving and The Devil All the Time, said<\/a> the loss of the theater was an \u201cexistential cultural issue that we\u2019re dealing with.\u201d Others were frustrated by the lack of transparency coming from NYU Langone or the reality that so many labs and hospital systems are already in the neighborhood: Bellevue, the Margaret Cochran Corbin VA Campus, the Alexandria Center for Life Science, and NYU Langone itself. \u201cIt might not seem like a big deal, but it\u2019s part of what makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood,\u201d said Jessica Lavoie, vice-president of the nearby Murray Hill Neighborhood Association. A petition<\/a> to save the theater now has over 11,000 signatures.<\/p>\n Judith Gross, the president of the Eleanor Roosevelt Independent Democrats \u2014 the party club for the assembly district \u2014 told me there is a \u201ccumulative effect\u201d to the loss of amenities to the health-care giants. When she was raising her daughter in the neighborhood in the early aughts, she says she took her to a garden at the corner of First Avenue and 34th Street. \u201cThey took it away when they built the children\u2019s hospital on the corner there,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it\u2019s been piece by piece.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the influencers are getting in on the pre-mourning. ElizabethEatsNYC (1.7 million TikTok followers) smeared mascara on her face and sat on the sticky lobby floor for a video<\/a> on how her \u201cfavorite theater\u201d is closing; she informs a regular \u2014 who is busy yelling at the popcorn seller \u2014 that the AMC is in its final days. \u201cWhat? When? Why?\u201d the distraught regular asks. The influencer says it was an \u201corganic encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n There are people who say<\/a> replacing a movie theater with a health-care facility is a good thing, and some have mocked the local politicians who are seizing on the issue. Podcaster Josh Barro wrote on X<\/a> that it is \u201cpreposterous\u201d to act \u201clike the government needs to mandate cinemas in specific neighborhoods.\u201d Others see this whole dispute as an entertaining example of how spaces change on an island in a constant state of reinvention. One friend who has enjoyed sending me updates of all things AMC vs. NYU texted an AI-generated meme he made. It reads \u201cThey Feed Us Poison\u201d over an AI-generated image of Tisch Hospital. Over an image of a theater, it reads \u201cWhile They Suppress Our Medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n Community members say it shouldn\u2019t have to be a conflict of movies against medicine. \u201cIt\u2019s about whether Kips Bay, the community, can remain a neighborhood or just slowly become a medical campus,\u201d says Kevin O\u2019Keefe, president of the local St. Vartan Park Conservancy, who also serves on the Bellevue community-advisory board. \u201cBut it\u2019s broader than that. Mental health comes into this.\u201d He points to the crisis of loneliness<\/a> that has taken hold at least since the pandemic. \u201cHaving a movie theater helps to alleviate that,\u201d he says. \u201cNobody\u2019s arguing against health care. We\u2019re just saying a healthy neighborhood needs more than health care.\u201d Treva Webeck, a Kips Bay resident since the late 1990s, has a similar idea; in one comment on Instagram tagging NYU Langone, she wrote about how movie theaters offer \u201cmental health breaks for stressful urban life.\u201d At the Gemini Diner a few blocks north of the theater, she expands on the concept. \u201cCinematherapy, it\u2019s an interesting idea,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not just offering healthy snacks at the counter.\u201d This argument may have best been expressed in a Reddit thread<\/a> on the theater closure from a man who says the AMC was a \u201cgodsend\u201d while he was \u201cwaiting out long ICU stays and many surgeries\u201d with his father.<\/p>\n The best-case scenario for a community raging against a nonprofit juggernaut with $15.4 billion<\/a> in annual revenue is to get elected officials to heed the call. By that metric, the community is succeeding. On September 20, the Eleanor Roosevelt Independent Democrats hosted a rally to save the theater with a full lineup of local officials: Manhattan borough president Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Assemblymember Keith Powers, City Councilmember Virginia Maloney, and State Senator Kristen Gonzalez. Micah Lasher, who this summer won the second-most-expensive House race in history for the 12th District, was also in attendance for the theatergoers among his constituents. \u201cPeople have very fond memories that are bound up in their neighborhood movie theater,\u201d he tells me. Those feelings may \u201ccome as a surprise to outside observers or a big educational and medical institution like NYU Langone. But it is not at all surprising to me.\u201d He also pointed to hope on the Upper West Side, where the former Metro Theater, closed in 2005, could reopen<\/a> as soon as 2028.<\/p>\n Powers, who proposed<\/a> legislation earlier this year to make pet food tax free, has been a leading voice on the issue; he was the first to confirm in August that NYU Langone had purchased the theater. He is still pushing for more information from the hospital system. \u201cIt\u2019s important for them to share an actually full-fledged plan with us,\u201d he says, so the community knows it is not just a \u201cconsolidation\u201d of nearby office space.<\/p>\n In a statement, NYU Langone confirmed it had purchased the site after the owner approached the hospital about a sale. The landlord, a company run by JD Carlisle Development, does not have a website and did not respond to phone calls for comment. Nor, despite all its fans, did AMC. (As for concerns about the Fairway in the same building, the supermarket wrote in a statement that it has a \u201clong-term lease for our Kips Bay location\u201d and looks forward to being a \u201cneighborhood partner for many years to come.\u201d) The hospital states the purchase is under contract and \u201cis not expected to close until early next year.\u201d To the frustration of Powers and others, NYU Langone will \u201cprovide updates on our clinical plans when the transaction is finalized.\u201d At a Manhattan Community Board 6 meeting on Thursday night, an NYU Langone representative was scheduled to be in attendance<\/a>, but the St. Vartan Park Conservancy stated on Wednesday night that the visit was canceled.<\/p>\n On Monday, it seemed Hoylman-Sigal might have his own Project Hail Mary when he announced he would \u201cnot approve any prospective rezoning of the Kips Bay AMC 15 site.\u201d When I asked about it later that morning, he told me he was looking to \u201cfigure out where we have leverage.\u201d But he says NYU Langone can \u201cacquire the property and use it for medical purposes as is without pursuing a rezoning.\u201d Also, he says, \u201cThe borough president\u2019s opinion is advisory. It\u2019s not definitive, but it does set the tone for the council decision.\u201d In his speech<\/a> at the rally to defend the theater, he quoted the famous AMC spot with Nicole Kidman on how \u201cheartbreak feels good in a place like this.\u201d<\/p>\n But what happens if that place no longer exists? With the writing all but projected on the wall, I went to see Primetime in Kips Bay last Friday afternoon. The lobby, for all the talk of a community space, was empty, save for an adult couple making out in the corner with the aggressiveness of a second or third date. Everyone else was on their phones, in their seats. The theater looks great. Marquee lightbulbs flare above the sidewalk on Second Avenue. The carpet pattern<\/a> in the hallways feels stuck in time, like a millennial\u2019s memory of a childhood mall. For the real heads, the theater is still showing<\/a> The Odyssey in Imax. But soon, the people of Kips Bay will probably have to find another place to see movies. How about the nearest AMC location? It is a one-mile walk<\/a> away.<\/p>\n