For a Forgotten Theater, It’s Time to Go to Church

By Mike Dobuski

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(Mike Duboski/The Fordham Ram)

It was a little after 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Most of the venue’s 3885 seats sat empty. There was an entire middle section roped off, and even the remaining seats were not filled to capacity. Still, the congregation was active. They hollered, waved and applauded at the live feed that ran on stage on front of them. They had the presence of something much larger. So did the man on the screen. Creflo Dollar, a televangelist from Georgia, recently purchased 2413 Grand Concourse, better known as the Paradise Theatre, to use as a place of worship for his church, Creflo Dollar ministries.

He is a preacher of the Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that wealth is a product of God’s goodwill, and that donations are an easy way to become wealthy yourself and engender God’s favor. Dollar was an excellent public speaker, and even though he was not physically present, his humor and personality made the service undeniably engaging.

Dollar made headlines last year for attempting to buy a Gulfstream G650, a private jet worth in excess of $65 million dollars, with money he made from his congregation. Evidence of the scandal was nowhere to be found in the Paradise Theatre that morning, however, as Dollar’s deep southern drawl reverberated off the sides of the ornately decorated walls. “It’s not favor when you ask for it!” he said. “It’s favoritism!”

It cost $4 million to build the Paradise Theatre in 1929. After changing hands a number of times, the theatre opened on Sept. 7 of that year, just in time for the Great Depression. It was owned and operated by Loew’s Theatres, which was, at the time, New York’s largest movie theatre chain.

The building stands out on the Grand Concourse as a vestige of a time gone by, when film was black and white and movie theatres were full of cigarette smoke. The design itself, incidentally, was inspired by a pipe organ. But this was not just any old organ. A “Wonder Organ” from the Robert Morton Organ Company was installed in each of Loew’s five Theatres, which, as a result, became known as the “Wonder Theatres”. The Paradise Theatre’s specific design is in the “atmospheric” style, and is supposed to call to mind a 16th century Italian Baroque garden.

Other adornments include an enormous marble fountain featuring a child riding a dolphin and domed ceilings containing elaborate, Sistine Chapel-style murals. Except, of course, the Biblical figures in these frescoes have been replaced with idols from the early days of theatre and film. Outside, a renovated Seth Thomas clock provides the backdrop for the hourly slaying of a dragon by a mechanical St. George.

The early years of the Paradise Theatre’s operation saw everything from extravagant stage productions to grandiose concerts to packed-in audiences enraptured by movies with names like “The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu.” However, the romance of the early days of Hollywood was not long lived in the Bronx, as the Paradise Theatre struggled to turn a profit in light of the Great Depression, and later, the borough’s urban blight. By the end of the 1940s, all live performances at the Paradise Theatre had been cancelled. Not long after, the very same Wonder Organ that inspired the building’s design was covered over with a slab of concrete to make room for an extra four rows of seats.

The cover was lifted in the 1960s, and the organ was moved to another Loew’s Theatre, this one in Jersey City, New Jersey. Sometime during the early 1970s, thieves managed ransack the figure of St. George after lowering it five stories to street level. It was never found again and was later replaced. More screens were added in 1973 and again in 1981. Despite this, the Paradise Theatre still failed to turn a profit and, in 1994, the building shut its doors for good.

That is, until the year 2000, during which a large-scale restoration of the site got underway brought about by both the Paradise Theatre’s facade and interior being registered as New York City Landmarks three years earlier. Ownership and construction disputes dogged the project for years, but in 2005, the space celebrated its grand re-opening as a live theatre and special event venue. While great efforts were taken to keep the design of the Paradise Theatre as close to the original as possible, the special events in question reflected the changes that the Bronx had undergone. Concert organists were replaced with salsa dancers and Latina beauty contests. Black and white movies were replaced with boxing matches. This continued for seven years before Creflo Dollar bought the space in 2012, which he has since used as a base for his New York operations.

As the service drew to a close, the screen changed to a slide detailing how one could donate to Creflo Dollar ministries by text. Ushers manning each of the aisles distributed envelopes in which participants could mail in their offerings, which Dollar promised would “reap a mighty harvest.” At the bottom of each of the envelopes there was a line that read “all funds received in excess of any project requirements or needs will be used to further the mission of the ministry.”

Music faded in as the crowd gravitated towards the stage, where the live feed of Creflo Dollar depicted him promising to heal those with physical ailments. One congregation member rose her child above her head in an effort to get the toddler closer to the image of the minister. Afterwards, a Christian rock group came out on the stage, and an MC directed those remaining to various reception areas, but not before Creflo Dollar left his followers with a final thought: “Never trust money more than God,” he said. “But how do you authenticate your trust in God without money?”

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