Twenty Years in the Dark

For the next two decades the building traded its stage for a screen. From 1970 to 1974 it housed the New York Academy of Theatrical Arts, and for a stretch it took bookings under the plainest name it has ever carried: 15 Vandam.

In 1975, Film Forum moved in. It had started as an Upper West Side loft with fifty folding chairs and a single projector, and founding director Karen Cooper later described the Vandam Street years without a trace of romance. The mission was the point: widen what an audience could be persuaded to pay to see. Film Forum moved to Watts Street in 1980 and to Houston Street in 1990, where it remains the last autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York.

Others followed into the room. In 1984 the Thalia — the legendary revival house that had opened uptown in 1931 — came downtown with producer Richard Schwartz; the original location closed in 1987, but the SoHo outpost lasted until 1990. In 1992, Jackie Raynal, formerly of the Bleecker Street Cinema, opened Le Cinematheque here and programmed obscure film noir almost exclusively. It closed the following year.

Twenty years of people sitting in the dark on Vandam Street, watching work nobody else would book. The building never changed its habits. It changed its medium.