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Curtain Falls On Cinema City

Theater Relocating Popular movie house changing venue; promises same good films

Hartford Courant

June 08, 2010

People said it was worn and seedy, but that never kept us from seeing a movie there. If the parking lot increasingly resembled the surface of the moon, well, we slowed down. The point was that the movies were good. So we'll miss Cinema City, the 38-year-old suburban-style theater across from the sewage treatment plant in Hartford's South Meadows. The Metropolitan District Commission is negotiating to buy the theater site to expand the treatment facility.

The four-screen complex is closing on July 22, but will reopen the next day as an adjunct to the Bow Tie Palace 17 and Odyssey Theater complex on New Park Avenue in the city's Parkville neighborhood. The new theater, to be called Cinema City at the Palace, is to feature five screens, stadium seating, a new café and other amenities, The Courant reports.

The Bow Tie Cinemas folks say they will continue to show the mix of foreign, independent and other art films that drew a loyal audience to the South Meadows. It's important that they keep this promise. It was just a few years ago that developers promised the new movie theater in Blue Back Square in West Hartford would have foreign and independent films, a promise that gone largely unkept.

We hope the new Cinema City will keep the old Cinema City's lineup. It's bad enough to lose the theater. Shouldn't somebody throw a party on the last night?