Bad News For Rodent's Hometown

Didn't know where else to put this...


We had an olde worlde cinema in our town.


Art Deco... built in the 60s.


Shut down a few years ago.

For the past few years it's been used for carpet storage... then, the carpet company sold it...


The new owners are gonna rip it down in place for......... flats.


Rate hive apartments.


Probably to be filled with junkies and scumbags within a decade like most flats and new built apartments.
Because there's no work in the area anyway. The last thing we need is more populous.



The Clifton was a hub for the town's nightlife for 40 years... now this classic cinema is gonna be smashed down and turned into a scum hole.


This comes 1 year after a 700 year old pub, barely 20 yards from The Clifton... was ripped down for the same purpose.
Without planning permission I might add (lawsuit is still ongoing).



I
Am
Gutted


And I've said some extremely choice words online on various groups.

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This was the heyday















Soon to be a dive... filled with scum.

That’s such a shame 🙁

Edit that... I said built in the 60s... it was actually built in the 1930s.

There's been numerous attempts to save the building over the years and get it reinstated as a cinema.


Not a chance.
Flats.

Is it too late to get some sort of citizens' group together?

There was a vaudeville theater in my home town, where Yoda's dad and I used to work as teens. It went downhill and ended up as a second-run movie theater, filled with downtown scumbags who paid the 80 cents to sit in the seats and get high or drunk. Then it closed, just after we left for college, I think.

Anyway, while we were away, local citizens petitioned and created a group to save the State Theater. And it worked. And it's been refurbished, restored, is gorgeous, and now is the venue for many great live productions. (That's where I saw/met Mel Brooks in 2016 when he was touring with a Q&A and screening of Blazing Saddles.)

My point is that I hope that perhaps not all hope is lost yet.

https://statetheatre.org/historical-photos

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What hideous looking architecture, I hope the inside looked better than the outside.

As I said, there's been numerous attempts and petitions to get it up and running again.


All that happened though was the local council upped the business rates to £100k a year so any new owners can't reinstate it as a cinema.


The local council here though are happy to spend £350 million on the town center and concreting the greenbelt between here and the north of the town, at a cost of almost a billion, for more houses.

1930s Art Deco... it's a fantastic venue... just needs a lick of paint and some new wiring.
Council just wants more council-tax payers.

After the Haygate got ripped down though without planning permission... nothing's sacred in this town anymore.


A Pub has been on that site for 700 years... now it's a block of flats.

Hey guys... wanna help?


http://chng.it/VLKCzfbsPh

Signed

Awesome, thanks man.

That's a shame about The Clifton. It didn't look very pretty, but it's about the movies, not about the building itself.

Maybe you can get something done through social media? I don't use any of those sites, so I don't know a lot about them, but I've read many stories about good things happening through social media campaigns. You might get lucky and find someone to pay for the restoration if the right person reads it,

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If I answer a game thread correctly, just skip my turn and continue with the game.
OPEN FLOOR.

Signed... from out near Pittsburgh. (Hope that's helpful.)

Dude, they are doing the same **** in my city. They are ripping out history in place of apartments.

I’m just glad I live in a nearby town that has done the opposite. We are revitalizing and repurposing our buildings but keeping defining features. We have converted an old high school to apartments but they left the auditorium for community events. And we’re converting a car dealership to a restaurant and they are keeping the original metal framing and leaving it exposed and using the showroom for retail space. And we turned our old library into a restaurant as well.

But I know what you’re feeling. The building my grandparents worked at and met almost 60 years ago is being gutted for high price apartments that no local working person could afford. And they defaced the building.

I sympathize with you, TR. I signed the petition, but these things rarely do any good. There's usually a two-headed problem: public interest, and funding.

Public interest is the bare minimum essential. Without a segment of the population wanting the theater restored, it is unlikely to happen. But the funding is the bottom. To properly re-furbish a large theater, and bringing it up to current codes requires lots of money. Where will that money come from? If there's massive interest, then people might pool a fund to get the job done. And if that many are interested the funding might be possible.

But it sounds like in this case the city council has made up its mind to raze the building to make way for other more tax-worthy projects. Also the specter of graft tends to rear its ugly head. The locals could sure campaign against the naysayers.

Two of the three classic theaters I regularly attended growing up in Pittsburgh are gone: the Sunset in Dormont, PA, and the Denis in Mt. Lebanon, PA (although the Denis possibly still exists for special events, even though the lovely marquee is gone). There remains the Hollywood Theater in Dormont.

All the great movie palaces in the downtown Pittsburgh area are gone. I recall the Penn Theater and the Fulton Theater, although there were at least two others. The Penn happily was re-furbished into Heinz Hall, where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra plays, having relocated from the old Syria Mosque in 1971. I believe it was the Fulton where I saw Psycho for the first time.

Sadly the great movie palaces have gone the way of horse drawn carriages. TV, then movie rentals, and now cable and streaming have very nearly obliterated movie theaters in general, let alone the grand old gals. But I hope some of them prevail. I'd sure attend one!!