Working to Again Light Up the Big Screen in a Majestic Home

Todd Heisler/The New York Times A fund-raising campaign is under way to allow movies to be shown again at the United Palace, an opulent theater in Washington Heights that opened in 1930.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times The original pipe organ inside the theater was damaged by water ad pyrotechnics.

Mike Fitelson is trying to bring something back to Washington Heights that it hasn’t had in decades â€" movies on the big screen.

Mr. Fitelson is the executive director of a nonprofit organization that began what he calls a “40-40-40-Plus” campaign on May 31. The goal is to raise $40,000 in 40 days to regularly present films at the United Palace Cathedral in Washington Heights for the first time in more than 40 years.

Forty-four years, actually, because the talk around the United Palace is that the last movie there â€" “2001: A Space Odyssey” â€" was shown one night in 1969. The next day, having handed over more than a half-million dollars, the new owner, the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, took over. And if the preacher, better known as Reverend Ike, was flamboyant, so was his church’s new home.

The United Palace, at 4140 Broadway at West 175th Street, was a Depression-era riot of architecture that almos! t defies description. Reverend Ike called it “fantabulous,” and with its gilded statues and grander-than-grand staircase, it seemed to symbolize an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to design. In his book “On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time,” David W. Dunlap, a reporter for The New York Times, summarized it as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco.”

Astonishing as the theater originally was, Reverend Ike added to the lavishness, buying Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture for what had been the men’s smoking room. (He used it as his library.)

Librado Romero/The New York Times The Rev. Frederick J. Eierenkoetter II, better known as Reverend Ike, made the building his church for years.

Now the United Palace stands as a survivor, still owned by Reverend Ike’s church. The building made it through the crack epidemic of the 1980s, which transformed the neighborhood into one of the city’s toughest.

The United Palace was also untouched by a scourge of a different kind, one that upset cineastes: the multiplexing of theaters. It still has every one of its 3,400 or so original seats. It also has the original balcony and the original dressing rooms for the vaudevillians who performed there.

With 20 days to go, the 40-40-40-Plus campaign has raised $21,335 on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding Web site. He said $700 more in checks had come in.

The campaign is focused on raising money to buy the digital projection system that the United Palace used at the premiere of “200 Cartas” on June 12. The film is a romantic comedy starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Tony Award-win! ning scor! e for the musical “In the Heights”; Jaime Camil, a Mexican telenovela star; and Dayanara Torres, a former Miss Universe.

Mr. Fitelson also wants to clean the 50-foot-wide screen at what he says would be the only theater in Manhattan north of 128th Street. Still, he does not see the United Palace as a first-run movie theater, but a home for special events â€" premieres of movies like “200 Cartas,” film festivals and films in Spanish as well as in English.

The theater opened in 1930, a year or so before a neighborhood-changing event, the completion of the George Washington Bridge. The United Palace was the fifth and one of the last of the Loew’s “Wonder Theaters” built in New York, and it opened with a Norma Shearer movie.

In 2001, one of the three ancient projectors in the booth was still cued up with a reel from a black-and-white movie starring Audie Murphy. (He was a World War II hero who had played himself in “To Hell and Back,” the film version of his memoir. But most f his movies were Westerns.)

Like many theaters of its day, the United Palace had a pipe organ. The instrument did not weather the passing years as well as the building. “The story is a rock band was in here, and their pyrotechnics lit the organ on fire,” Mr. Fitelson said. “The bad part was that when the sprinklers came on, they ruined the pipes.”

Mr. Fitelson said 5,000 people squeezed into the United Palace in Reverend Ike’s early years there. But the congregation dwindled in the 1990s, and Reverend Ike, who moved to Los Angeles in 2007, died in 2009. His son, Xavier Eikerenkoetter, 48, said only 100 or so worshipers attend Sunday services nowadays â€" so few that the services are no longer held in the theater, but in a small room that was originally a storefront.

The church has maintained the building’s tax-exempt status over the years, although it occasionally rented it out to outside promoters for events like indie rock concerts. Mr. Fitelson’s organization, the ! United Pa! lace of Cultural Arts, is officially separate from the church, though there is an overlap. The founder and president is Xavier Eikerenkoetter.

Mr. Fitelson said the theater could handle everything from hip-hop performances on the mezzanine to a circus-arts camp for children.

“Part of the concept is this was a deluxe movie theater and a vaudeville house,” he said. “What is vaudeville in the 21st century? It’s a mash-up of different artistic forms, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Todd Heisler/The New York Times The United Palace was one of several movie halls opened by Loew’s in New York City.