By Chris Lombardi
The sight of the closed movie theater at 333 W. 23rd St. in Chelsea appears at first depressingly familiar. The ticket windows rolled up, there is only a nicely printed note: CLOSED. THANK YOU FOR YOUR YEAR OF PATRONAGE—CLEARVIEW CINEMAS.
But the notice doesn’t tell the rest of the story. It doesn’t say that the space, which has operated the two-screen theater as Chelsea West Cinemas for more than a decade, will become a nonprofit theater under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts, a 50-year-old institution that has been quietly expanding its presence in Chelsea for 20 years.
SVA announced last month that it had leased the 20,000-square-foot theater, quoting school president David Rhodes in language that echoes other major universities in the process of expansion Downtown, including New York University and the New School: “SVA is, first and foremost, a place where creative people can come together and learn from one another. We want to be sure that we have adequate resources to do that well into the future.”
The announcement came only a few weeks after SVA signed a 14-year lease to expand into the entire 54,000-square-foot space at 335 W. 16th St. for its Bachelor of Fine Arts program, after inhabiting only a portion of the building. The school noted that the theater itself would be redesigned by well-known designer and SVA acting chairman Milton Glaser, who created the ubiquitous “I ♥ New York” graphic, as well as the interior for Chelsea’s own Rubin Museum.
But unlike the expansions of its more famous brethren, SVA’s move into Chelsea has so far been slow, relatively low-profile and free of contention. This week, Chelsea residents largely welcomed news of the theater conversion, including the building’s owner, the Mutual Housing Redevelopment Corporation at Penn South. The move, said administrators interviewed by Chelsea Now, demonstrates both the school’s identification with the neighborhood’s diverse, working-class roots and its commitment to a living arts district.
Provost Christopher Cyphers, in a phone conversation this week, emphasized that the school is no newcomer to the area. “We’ve been on 21st St. since the 1980s,” he said, referring to the school’s painting studios at 132-136 W. 21st St.
SVA, founded in 1947 as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, was at first a trade school for GI’s returning from World War II. It soon changed its name and broadened its mission, though until the 1990s, “we were still largely a commuter school for students from the tri-state area, who worked during the day,” said Cyphers.
But slowly, SVA outgrew both its original location on E. 23rd St. and its longtime headquarters on Wooster St. in Soho, especially as “Soho turned into a shopping mall around us,” Cyphers said. The school began to rent more and more studio and classroom space, both at the 16th and the 21st St. buildings. In 2003, Cyphers added, once “Soho ceased to be the gallery scene it once was,” the school moved its galleries into Chelsea’s landmark Starrett-Leigh Building, a former warehouse now central to the gallery scene on W. 26th St.
This incremental move into Chelsea has paralleled the school’s own growth. “Our enrollment has increased substantially,” Cyphers said. “And it has become both more traditional and more diverse.” Currently, SVA’s 3,323 undergraduate students come from 47 states and 45 countries, with a similar distribution for its small but growing graduate class. More then one-third live in SVA dorms, which Cyphers considered quite a rapid change. “In 1992 we had only 400 beds. Now we have more than 1,000,” he said. The school is also in the process of completing a 13-floor dormitory complex on the Lower East Side.
But the most radical expansion has taken place in the school’s academic offerings, noted Cyphers, who became provost in 2002. Over time, he said, SVA has developed a host of new programs, including graduate programs in art criticism and writing, design criticism, digital photography, and a BFA program in visual and critical studies.
Such expansion, Cyphers said, creates “a certain level of expectation” among students and their parents. Both Cyphers and SVA spokesperson Michael Grant emphasized that much of the physical expansion has occurred to ensure that the school meets those expectations, as when it leased all of the 16th St. building to provide state-of-the-art facilities to its BFA students. The new, interdisciplinary approach to “fine arts,” Grant said, comes with long list of needs: art recording, editing, projection and printmaking facilities, and dedicated sculpture studios with computerized milling machines. Meanwhile, the 21st St. buildings were purchased last summer to house the school’s new MFA Design Criticism Department, billed by the school as “the first graduate program in the U.S. dedicated to interpreting design in all its forms.”
Grant added that as these changes were occurring, SVA’s film students and faculty still had to show their films in auditoriums—or borrow commercial or university theaters. So the school turned to the real estate broker who had shepherded most of its Chelsea transition: Neil Lipinski, vice president at firm Colliers ABR.
“We know a little about the neighborhood,” Lipinski wryly told Chelsea Now this week. After he negotiated the school’s 30-year lease at Starrett-Leigh for 9,000 square feet of gallery space, Lipinski brokered the 21st St. sale and persuaded the commercial tenant to allow SVA to buy out its lease at 335 W. 16th St. So when SVA’s board asked him to look for a theater, he looked first in Chelsea.
“There it was, right on 23rd Street—my goodness, a 900-seat theater with two screens,” Lipinski said. “So I reached out to Clearview.” As it turned out, Clearview was amenable, only expressing concern over whether the operator of the theater would be a competitor. So SVA agreed to a lease stating that they would not screen Hollywood movies, and Clearview agreed to the buyout. “And the landlord loved it!” Lipinksi said.
The owner of the theater, Mutual Redevelopment Houses, Inc., created during the 1950s to manage the Penn South affordable-housing condominium, also owns a swath of the blocks that surround the Penn South complex. In addition to Duane Reade, Gristede’s and Dallas BBQ, its current tenants include the Broadmoor residence hotel and the Cerebral Palsy Foundation of New York City. The income from these buildings “help support our mission, which is to provide affordable housing,” Penn South general manager Brendan Keany told Chelsea Now this week.
“We’re excited to have an educational institution here at Penn South,” Keany added.
MRC did insist, as a provision of the lease, that SVA agree to hire only union workers for all renovations to the interior. The school agreed, and the deal was done.
To Lipinski, Penn South’s blessing is about the best Chelsea endorsement SVA could get. “Mutual Redevelopment Houses would not have accepted them as a tenant if they were not a good corporate citizen,” he said.
An informal survey found most Chelsea residents were unaware of SVA’s latest expansion, though most liked the idea. Josh Benson, co-founder of Friends of the High Line, said he was particularly pleased to hear that Milton Glaser would be involved in the theater’s rebirth. “I think it’s fantastic,” Benson said. “That theater has tremendous potential, and it’s never had the loving treatment it deserves. And Milton Glaser is a major force who has had a tremendous impact on New York City in so many ways. For him to be doing both the interior and the exterior, that’s going to be of great benefit to West Chelsea.”
Across the street from the theater, Larry, the manager of Patsy’s Pizza on 23rd St., struck a more plaintive note. “It hurts a little, losing that theater,” he said. “School is very important, but...” Asked if a possible influx of students might help his business, he shrugged and repeated that he had enjoyed having a first-run house across the street. “It was nice.”
Grant said that while the theater will launch in the fall under SVA’s new director of film, Gene Stavis, movies will start rolling at the cinema far sooner than that. “We’ll start with a student film festival this summer,” he said. “It’s so great to have our own theater—the filmmakers can’t wait.”
Network engineer Rotchild Mablok, who lives on the Upper West Side but spends a lot of time in Chelsea, heralded the change. “Chelsea already has a movie theater not that far away, and they weren’t playing uncommon movies [here] anyway.” Besides, he added, the arrival of a school could only better the community. “The more schools there are, the more educated people are, and the more people will get along!”
