Tabernacle of Prayer, Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, Queens, New York City, New York, United States

Located on Jamaica Avenue at Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, the major commercial center of the borough of Queens and once a major theater center for Queens and Long Island, the Loew’s Valencia is the borough’s largest and most famous remaining movie palace. Designed by theater architect John Eberson and opened in 1929, the 3554-seat Valencia was the first of five so-called "Wonder Theaters" built for the New York-based Loew’s chain of movie theaters to serve the major metropolitan population centers outside midtown Manhattan.

Eberson, who created the "atmospheric theater" type, was one of America’s most prolific and influential theater designers, and the Valencia was among his most important commissions. Its romantic, brick and glazed terra-cotta facade was inspired by Spanish and Mexican architecture of the Baroque or "Churrigueresque" period, with detail including elaborate ornamental terra-cotta pilasters, cherubs’ heads, half-shells, volutes, floral swags, curvilinear gables and decorative finials. The Valencia entertained the people of Queens for half a century. Since 1977, it has housed the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People, which has maintained the building’s exterior almost completely intact.

Development of Jamaica

Jamaica, one of the oldest settlements within the boundaries of New York City, developed into the leading commercial and entertainment center of Queens County. The Dutch purchased land in Jamaica from the Jameco (also spelled Jemeco) Indians in 1655.

The following year, Governor Peter Stuyvesant granted a charter to the town, originally known as Rusdorp.

Following the transfer of power from the Dutch to the English in 1664, Rusdorp was renamed Jamaica, after the original Indian inhabitants of the region. Queens County (incorporating present-day Queens and Nassau Counties) was chartered in 1683.

The English established Jamaica as the governmental center of Queens County, with a court, county clerk’s office, and parish church (Grace Church; the present structure, dating from 1861-62, is a designated New York Landmark). Outside the town center, Jamaica was largely an area of farm fields and grazing land for cattle. The rural village was officially incorporated by New York State in 1814.

Jamaica’s central location in Queens County, and the extensive transportation network that developed in the town during the nineteenth century, resulted in the transformation of the community into the major commercial center for Queens County and much of eastern Long Island. It was the arrival of the railroads that began this transformation.

The roads and rail lines — connecting Jamaica with other sections of Queens County, with Brooklyn to the west, eastern Long Island, and ferries to New York City — had a tremendous impact. Jamaica’s farmland was soon being subdivided into streets and building lots, and new homes were erected.

By the turn of the century, Jamaica’s importance as a commercial area became evident in the impressive buildings appearing on Jamaica Avenue. After Jamaica was incorporated into the borough of Queens and became a part of New York City on January 1, 1898, additional transportation improvements brought increasing numbers of people. As a result, the population of Jamaica quadrupled between 1900 and 1920.

It was during the 1920s, when the major mass transit links were in place, and during a period when private automobile ownership was growing at an extraordinary rate, that Jamaica experienced its major expansion as a commercial and entertainment center.

By 1925, Jamaica Avenue between 160th Street and 168th Street had the highest assessed valuation in Queens County.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, many small-scale commercial buildings were erected in Jamaica, as well as several major office and commercial structures on Jamaica Avenue. In addition, Jamaica developed into a significant entertainment center.

By the mid-1930s, there were over sixty restaurants, bars, and clubs, ranging from small ethnic taverns to elegant restaurants. And there were at least eight movie theaters on or just off Jamaica Avenue, including the Carlton, Hillside,

Alden, Merrick, Jamaica, and Savoy, and, largest of all, the Valencia Theater, which opened in 1929.

Loew’s Valencia Theater

The Valencia was one of four theaters originally planned by the Paramount-Publix chain for four major residential centers outside Midtown Manhattan. These included the Kings on Flatbush Avenue in the geographic center of Brooklyn, the Paradise in the Bronx at the commercial hub of the Grand Concourse near Fordham Road, and the Jersey in the heart of Jersey City. When Paramount-Publix looked for a central location for its Queens theater, the logical choice was the commercial center of Jamaica.

According to Paramount-Publix’s initial plans, the architectural firm of Rapp & Rapp was to design the Kings and the Jersey, while John Eberson was to design the Valencia and the Paradise. Both firms had designed many theaters for Paramount-Publix, and for its predecessor, Balaban & Katz, in Chicago and the Midwest.

As a result of the 1925 agreement that kept Paramount from building more theaters in New York and Loew’s from entering the Chicago market, the four Paramount theater projects passed to Loew’s. Paramount, however, appears to have maintained an interest in the theaters, using them as New York outlets for Paramount pictures.

Loew’s also added a fifth theater, the 175th Street, designed by the company’s preferred theater architect, Thomas Lamb. Each of the theaters included a Morton "Wonder" organ, apparently the origin of the name "Wonder Theaters" that has since been applied collectively to the five houses. The five theaters, all of which survive in varying states of repair, were among the most lavish movie palaces ever built in the greater New York City area. The Valencia was the first of the five to open.

In 1926-27 builder R. Riccardo acquired a site at the intersection of Jamaica Avenue and Merrick Road and subdivided it, keeping the corner plot on which he built the six-story Riccardo Building, and selling the other half to the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (Paramount). Riccardo’s agreement with that company apparently included certain restrictions "to assure Jamaica of a beautiful theater." When Famous-Players-Lasky sold the property to Loew’s, the property remained subject to those restrictions.22 Loew’s filed plans for the Valencia Theater in 1927; construction, by the Thompson-Starrett Company, commenced in June 1928, and was completed in December. The Valencia opened for business on Saturday, January 12, 1929.

Erected at a cost exceeding two million dollars, seating approximately 3500, and one of the first theaters built with sound equipment for the new "talkies," the Valencia was meant to serve not just Jamaica, but all of Queens and the greater Long Island area, offering first-run sound pictures along with stage shows imported from the Capitol Theater on Broadway. It was described as "the first Me luxe’ theatre on Long Island."

Its anticipated opening provoked enormous amounts of coverage in the Long Island Daily Press, a regional paper headquartered in Jamaica. Multiple-page coverage in that paper the day before opening included biographies of Marcus Loew and his successor Nicholas Schenck, and stories and photos of the stage show’s stars. Once the theater opened, in keeping with its role as a theater drawing from a wide regional market, movies playing at the Valencia were not shown anywhere else in the vicinity, as far east as Bay Shore, Long Island.

The Valencia was designed as a large movie palace, with a narrow mid-block facade containing the entrance lobby on Jamaica Avenue, and the bulk of the theater with the auditorium, stage, and stagehouse behind, along Merrick Boulevard, not quite half the block towards 89th Avenue. For the 40-foot-wide Jamaica Avenue facade, Eberson created an elaborate architectural fantasy in brick and terra cotta, using elements from Spanish and Mexican churches of the Baroque, or "Churrigueresque," period.

The Churrigueresque style, named after the Spanish architect J.M. de Churriguera, was an eighteenth-century modification of the Italian Baroque, incorporating Moorish and Gothic decorative elements. The Spanish-influenced design fit the exotic-sounding name of the theater (Valencia), a combination found in other movie palaces of the period (e.g., the Granada Theater, Chicago; Levy & Klein, 1926). The Indiana Theater, in Indianapolis (Rubush & Hunter, 1927), has a facade similar to the Valencia’s. Eberson used the style in his 1928 Majestic Theater in San Antonio, while elsewhere in Queens Thomas Lamb made use of the style at the RKO Keith’s (1928).

The Spanish Baroque character of the Valencia’s facade is created by the use of elaborate curving and twisted forms, spiral volutes, double columns adorned with florid patterns, and elaborate ornament including shells, wreaths, cherubim and foliate capitals. A series of curves and pinnacles is repeated three times: on the (original) marquee, at the surround of the main window opening, and again at the roofline. The Spanish motif is continued inside in the spectacular, atmospheric design of the lobby and auditorium.

The Valencia opened to much acclaim. Queensborough Magazine, published by the Chamber of Commerce of the Borough of Queens, considered the Valencia to be one of the "outstanding improvements" in the borough in 1928.30 William F. Hofmann, publisher of the Long Island Daily Press, wrote that the Valencia, "properly called the most beautiful theatre in the country," marked the climax of a "new era in the history of Jamaica," and "another milestone in the steady, healthy progress this community is making towards leadership in all fields of commercial endeavour."

The architectural magazine Architecture and Building wrote of the Valencia:

Having a seating capacity of 4,000, it compares favorably with the largest New York City houses and offers both motion picture and stage performances of the most elaborate character. The architectural treatment is a most elaborate development of Mexican Spanish ornament.

The Valencia as a Major Movie Palace

As part of the enormous chain of Loew’s theaters, the Valencia was able to run a full program of vaudeville acts and a first-run feature sound film. The opening day’s program on Saturday, January 12, 1929, which ran continuously from 11 a.m. until midnight, attracted an estimated 17,000 customers. Queens Borough President George U. Harvey gave an inaugural address.

The inaugural program featured MGM’s sound film White Shadows in the South Seas. According to the Long Island Daily Press: the most up-to-date electrical effects for singing, talking and sound pictures which have been installed in the new theatre will be used in giving ‘White Shadows’ the sound effects that were to a great extent responsible for the extensive run on Broadway.

The stage show featured the revue "My Mantilla," brought in from the Capitol Theater on Broadway; a stage band directed by Walt Roesner; a symphony orchestra directed by Don Albert; and the following performers as described in the Long Island Daily Press:

Bob Nelson, well known musical comedy star, White & Manning, world famed comedy dancers, King & King, late features of ‘Artists and Models,’ and Gertrude Lang, soprano and late prima donna at ‘Blossom Time,’ Forrest Yarnell, baritone, and Livie Marracci, the fairest of all Italy and winner of the Internationa] beauty contest held at Galveston, Texas, last summer, who will appear in the grand finale supported by the 24 Chester Hale Girls.

The Valencia continued the movie and stage show formula for several decades. In the theater’s first years, ticket prices ranged from 25 cents for orchestra and balcony seats on weekday mornings to 65 cents on Saturday, Sunday, and holiday evenings.

Broadway and other stars regularly graced its stage, including such famous performers as Ginger Rogers and Kate Smith. In the 1930s, the theater included as a regular Monday night feature, the winners of the Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour.

After its stage show policy was discontinued, the Valencia stayed in use as a movie theater. In the 1950s, a new, larger "panoramic" screen was installed in the theater, along with "stereophonic" sound, making the Valencia the first theater in Queens to offer these effects.

Gerald F. Twohig, writing in the Long Island Press in 1974, called the Valencia "the Taj Mahal of Long Island movie houses." In his recollection, The Valencia wasn’t just another movie house. It was the greatest of them all in those times when Queens in general and Jamaica in particular were big on movies. If you had a heavy date on Saturday night, you went to the Valencia. You proved you had class.

Later History

Following the end of World War II, with changing theater economics and the rise of television, a wave of theater alterations and demolitions began to claim large numbers of movie palaces across the country. In the 1960s, the management of many of the largest theaters, no longer able to attract audiences of several thousand, closed off whole seating sections.

Eventually, many were either subdivided into smaller theaters with accompanying loss of interior ornament, or demolished for reuse of their valuable large sites. In New York, most of the large Manhattan movie palaces disappeared, while those surviving in the other boroughs were either subdivided or abandoned and subsequently vandalized.

In 1976, rumors circulated that Loew’s was considering closing the Valencia Theater. That threat brought an outcry from residents of Jamaica and Queens. Various plans for the theater’s reuse were proposed — among others, the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation suggested its conversion into a cultural center, and a "permanent home for the Queens Symphony Orchestra."

In 1977 Loew’s closed the Valencia Theater and donated it to the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People, a church congregation formerly located in Brooklyn. In an interview that year its pastor, Rev. Johnnie Washington, described the gift as "a miracle, a gift from God. A miracle at a time when miracles are not supposed to happen."

Rev. Washington admired the building’s design:
It’s like entering a fantasy world, isn’t it? We decided to keep the atmosphere of the movie house. It’s such a beautiful place— How could we ever replace what is already here? It has a beauty, an atmosphere that makes you feel you are at some place sacred.

The church undertook a major interior restoration, overseen by George Exarchou.

Today, the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People continues to use and care for the former Valencia, which remains very much a visible presence in the heart of downtown Jamaica.

Description

The former Loew’s Valencia Theater building, located on the north side of Jamaica Avenue and the west side of Merrick Boulevard, extends along Jamaica for 39.4 feet and along Merrick for 210 feet. The building occupies an irregularly shaped lot, wrapping around a smaller building at the corner of the two streets.

The steel-framed structure has three elevations: a Jamaica Avenue entrance facade with an elaborate terra-cotta faced frontispiece; a long side wall on Merrick Boulevard with exit doors and a fire stairs; and a rear wall visible from the adjoining parking lot. These last two sections are faced in brick set in panels.

Jamaica Avenue facade;

Base: The first story contains a wide entrance to the lobby of the theater, with a centrally placed ticket booth projecting from the entrance doors to the property line. The booth is defined by eight slender but elaborately designed cast-metal columns rising to finials, with foliate screens at the top; a fret pattern adorns its base. The glass doors to either
side have decorative metal framing over them, with rectangular single glass panes above.

Framing the entrance at the property line, at either side, are twin metal volutes (the area below them is now enclosed by large announcement boards). The volutes support an overhead metal panel whose underside has foliate infill; its face is currently covered by a large sign. A large marquee projects above the base; it has been covered with protective materials.

The original marquee included stamped zinc ornamental designs, and a central sign spelling out "Loew’s Valencia." There is decorative polychromatic tilework in the pavement in front of the doors.

Upper stories: The upper stories are designed in an extravagant Spanish Baroque style, with elaborate terra-cotta forms projecting from a yellow brick background. The brick background is composed of a slightly projecting diaper-pattern of brick headers, their crossing accented by colored tiles, superimposed over horizontal rows of stretchers.

The large central window opening has an elaborate terra-cotta surround and is flanked by heavily ornamented paired pilasters. The window has multi-light sash in three sections: a wide central section five-panes in width, flanked by narrower sections two panes in width.

Beneath the foliate capitals of the pilasters are small cherubs’ heads, while the pilasters themselves are adorned with larger cherubs’ heads, half-shells, volutes, and floral swags.

Directly above the window opening are spiral volutes supporting a curving gable form, surrounding a multi-pane sash, above which rises an elaborate terra-cotta infill including sphinxes and floral patterns. The infill is framed by another elaborate gable form, which mimics the massive curvilinear gable of the roofline above, accented by three crowning decorative finials.

To either side of the central window and its surround, at the lower level of the facade, is a single narrow lancet window; the brick section above rises to a lower roofline with a large decorative finial. A large, modern sign in the form of a cross, lettered with the name of the church, has been added to the facade; it projects out from the facade on metal supports.

- From the 1999 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

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