Why United Palace matters.
United Palace is an opulent movie palace where Washington Heights' cultural character meets Thomas W. Lamb's theatrical architecture, Harold Rambusch's vivacious ornament and a vast auditorium preserved from cinema's interwar golden age.
Set along Broadway near West 175th Street and just steps from J. Hood Wright Park, the theater fills an entire block extending east to Wadsworth Avenue, with its auditorium rising above a Lower Broadway frontage originally built for shops and offices. Thomas W. Lamb organized the exterior around a projecting entrance pavilion, pointed arches, tiered pilasters, intricate terra-cotta ornament and a vertical blade sign that gives the southwest corner an emphatic presence along Broadway. Inside, broad staircases, balconies, elaborate plasterwork and densely ornamented surfaces lead toward an auditorium holding more than 3,000 seats, making United Palace Manhattan's fourth-largest venue of its type. Decorative specialist Harold Rambusch layered the interior with Byzantine, Romanesque, Indo-Hindu, Sino-Moorish, Persian, Rococo and Art Deco references, producing a theatrical environment conceived as part of the entertainment itself. The result is a block-filling theater whose elaborate street facade, processional interior and enormous auditorium preserve the architectural ambition that Loew's brought to Upper Manhattan at the end of the 1920s.
What defines United Palace.
United Palace is best known for surviving as the former Loew's 175th Street Theatre, among five lavish Wonder Theatres created by Loew's around metropolitan New York at the beginning of the sound-film era. Completed in 1929-1930, the building opened on February 22, 1930, with MGM's Their Own Desire starring Norma Shearer and the stage revue Pearls. The opening coincided with Washington's Birthday and included a Boy Scout parade through Washington Heights, placing the new house within a neighborhood celebration as well as Loew's metropolitan theater campaign. Film exhibition soon dominated the program, and the house continued through profound changes in American moviegoing across the following four decades. Tito Puente performed there in 1952, Joan Crawford appeared in 1964 to promote Strait-Jacket, and Loew's experimented with the Vendaticket automated box office in 1960 and a closed-circuit professional football presentation in 1964 as large single-screen theaters confronted changing economics. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey became the final film of the Loew's era in 1969. Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, known as Reverend Ike, and his wife Eula Mae encountered the building during a screening of Kubrick's film and purchased it from Loew's through the United Christian Evangelistic Association for $600,000 on April 4, 1969. The acquisition spared a major surviving movie palace as comparable theaters across New York disappeared or underwent extensive alteration. Reverend Ike's congregation renamed the building United Palace, using the former cinema as its headquarters and broadcasting base as his ministry expanded through syndicated radio and television.
The Robert-Morton Wonder Organ carries a separate strand of United Palace history back to the building's original entertainment technology. Loew's commissioned a 4-manual, 23-rank Wonder Morton for every Wonder Theatre, creating five related instruments for the circuit's grandest houses. The United Palace instrument remains the sole member of that group still occupying its original venue and one of the last all-original theater organs surviving in the world. Water and fire damage eventually left it unplayable in the early 2000s, prompting United Palace and the New York Theatre Organ Society to begin a multiphase restoration in 2016. Preservation of the wider building achieved another milestone on December 13, 2016, when the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the former Loew's 175th Street Theatre, followed by City Council affirmation in April 2017. The protected exterior retained significant original components including the entrance doors, ticket booth, marquee, blade sign, ornamental terra cotta and the complex facades wrapping the block. United Palace of Cultural Arts, founded in 2012, expanded the building's role through concerts, film and community arts programming, adding another institutional layer to a structure already shaped by Loew's cinema and Reverend Ike's ministry. The surviving Wonder Morton, protected architecture and continuing performance program preserve three intertwined chapters of the building without erasing the physical infrastructure inherited from its 1930 movie-palace origins.
How United Palace fits.
United Palace works as the anchor for a Washington Heights outing connecting colonial Manhattan, Revolutionary military history and Archer Milton Huntington's extraordinary Upper Manhattan center for Hispanic art.
Begin at Morris-Jumel Mansion, constructed 1765 as Mount Morris for British Colonel Roger Morris and Mary Philipse Morris on an estate exceeding 100 acres. The Georgian-Palladian residence occupied one of Manhattan Island's highest points and incorporated an octagonal wing among its unusually advanced architectural features. George Washington established his headquarters there on September 15, 1776 following the Continental Army's retreat from Brooklyn, remaining for about five weeks as the Battle of Harlem Heights unfolded nearby; British General Sir Henry Clinton and Hessian forces later occupied the house during the conflict. Stephen and Eliza Jumel acquired the property in 1810, and New York City purchased the surviving residence in 1903 before its conversion into a museum. Continue to Audubon Terrace, the cultural campus conceived by philanthropist and collector Archer Milton Huntington on land once belonging to naturalist John James Audubon. Huntington acquired his first eight lots for the Hispanic Society in 1904 and commissioned cousin Charles Pratt Huntington to design its Main Building, completed in 1905 before the Museum and Library opened publicly in 1908. The American Numismatic Society and American Geographical Society joined the campus by 1910, and later construction extended the ensemble through buildings sharing a Beaux-Arts and American Renaissance architectural approach. Conclude at Hispanic Society Museum & Library, where Huntington assembled a collection exceeding half a million objects across the arts and literature of Spain, Portugal, Latin America and the Philippines, including works by El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and Sorolla. Huntington commissioned Joaquín Sorolla in 1911 to create Vision of Spain, fourteen immense canvases painted across Spain between 1912 and 1919 that together extend 200 feet. The paintings finally opened in their dedicated gallery in 1926, three years after Sorolla's death; their 2007-2010 Spanish tour drew more than two million people before the renovated gallery reopened in New York. The progression moves from Morris-Jumel Mansion's colonial and Revolutionary chapters through Huntington's creation of Audubon Terrace and culminates inside the Hispanic Society's vast collection and Sorolla commission, connecting three unusually consequential cultural layers of Upper Manhattan.
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