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134 “An Acre of Seats in a Garden of Dreams” vines, flowering shrubs, and a seemingly endless assortment of sculpture and statuary, including busts of Shakespeare and Wagner, statues of Venus, Apollo Belvedere, Cupid, and King Arthur, and a larger-than-life figure of Lorenzo de Medici. Above this extravagance floated the indescribably romantic sky, poised to darken and come alive with drifting clouds and pinpoint stars as showtime approached. “We credit the deep azure blue of the Mediterranean sky with a therapeutic value,” Eberson once said, “soothing the nerves and calming perturbing thoughts.” These “friendly stars,” as Eberson called them, had been laid out by his son, who had joined his father’s firm a few years earlier and who in arranging the stars followed a pattern “generally utilizing the January skies.” In doing so, he depicted the heavens as they would have appeared at the time of the birth of Marcus Loew, who had died just two years before the completion of the Bronx picture palace that bore his name. Such sumptuousness did not come cheap. A preliminary cost report prepared that December for the Concourse Realty Corporation, the company that built the theater, showed that in addition to $34,500 for the Wonder Organ and $6,750 for the clock, expenses included $9,443 for artificial flowers, trees, and shrubs; $25,000 for decorative furniture, much of which had been imported from Europe; and $168,000 for ornamental plaster. Yet despite the lavishness of the décor, the creation of the Paradise was in some respects an oddly personal affair, almost a domestic undertaking . Unable to find craftsmen who could paint the birds and the other ornamental details to his liking, Eberson created an entity called Michael Angelo Studios that in reality was his wife, an English-born decorator named Beatrice Lamb, who supervised a crew of skilled designers and craftsmen. With the help of the couple’s daughters, Beatrice Eberson also assembled the heraldic banners that hung over the balconies while their son, Drew, tended to such mundane tasks as adjusting the pigeons and keeping an eye on the Brenograph, apparently a temperamental piece of equipment. For the grand opening, the list of attractions, extensive even under normal circumstances, was unusually impressive. The singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was followed by music by the Paradise Grand Orchestra and a solo at the Wonder Organ. The stage show, Cameos, featured Dave Schooler and His Paradise Serenaders, the theater’s resident singers, along with the Chester Hale Girls, a collection of leggy young women that included a vivid brunette named Kitty Carlisle who went on to marry a celebrated Bronx-born playwright named Moss Hart. Next came congratulatory messages transmitted from Hollywood by Loew’s president, Nick “An Acre of Seats in a Garden of Dreams” 135 Schenk, and various stars associated with the Loew’s-controlled MGM studio. Only well into the evening did the opening credits roll on the feature film, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Warner Oland, Neil Hamilton , and Jean Arthur. Patrons in the balcony who were listening carefully heard the singing of live canaries, another festive touch to welcome the new playhouse to the Bronx. 1 • 2 To hear some people tell the story, no one in the West Bronx saw a movie anywhere but at the Paradise, and of course that was not true. The area was rich with theaters showing first- and second-run pictures, especially in the vicinity of bustling Fordham Road. And virtually every serious West Bronx moviegoer spent countless hours at the Ascot, a beloved art house that opened in 1935 at 183rd Street, a few blocks south of the Paradise. After sipping a tiny cup of inky espresso in the lower level—the Ascot also boasted one of the city’s first coffee bars—moviegoers entered the long, narrow playhouse, there to get early glimpses of such classics as Marcel Pagnol’s Fanny trilogy from the 1930s and Roberto Rossellini’s Open City and The Bicycle Thief, two of the great Italian neorealist films from the 1940s, as soon as they arrived in the United States. Programs at the Ascot changed only when business dwindled, and certain films were screened so often that the prints literally wore out. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, voted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best foreign film of 1958, ran for nearly five months; the British New Wave film Room at the Top, the...

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