The marquee at Broadway and 99th Street has been dark since 2005. Ask anyone who has walked past 2626 Broadway in the past two decades and they will tell you the same thing: pink terra cotta facade, boarded windows, a landmark plaque that reads more like an epitaph than a promise. The Metro Theater has outlasted three names, a run as a first-run house, a stint as an arthouse, and a period in the 1970s and 80s when it was neither of those things. It has not, until very recently, outlasted its own closure.
This summer, though, you can watch a movie under the Metro's name without setting foot inside it. The theater itself is still gutted down to the studs. The programming is happening everywhere around it.
A landmark that's been waiting since 2005
The Metro Theater is a movie theater at 2626 Broadway on the Upper West Side, designed in the Art Deco style and built between 1932 and 1933, and although its interior was demolished after it closed in 2005, the original facade remains intact and is a New York City designated landmark. Ira Deutchman and Adeline Monzier established the Upper West Side Cinema Center in July 2024 to buy the building, offered $6.9 million for it that September, and finalized the purchase in April 2025 after raising the funds. That October, Deutchman announced the theater would be rebranded the Uptown Film Center, with a $29 million fundraising goal and a target to begin construction by 2027.
The renovation is not a light lift. In March, a group of Upper West Siders in hard hats toured the stripped interior, and Deutchman did not oversell what was left to see. "There's going to be no surprises to you, because we're down to the studs," he told the group, standing in what will eventually be the lobby café.
"This is a neighborhood project as much as it is an arts project."
That line, from Beth Krieger, one of Deutchman's colleagues at the nonprofit, during the same tour, is the closest thing this story has to a thesis. The plan calls for four floors and five screens, one capable of projecting 35mm and 70mm film alongside digital, plus a dedicated education screen and a café. The nonprofit is currently in the schematic design phase, still budgeting before it starts cutting anything. The organization is targeting a reopening by the end of 2028.
Which means for the next two-plus years, the Uptown Film Center exists almost entirely as a series of appearances.
The theater without a building already has a summer season
In June, the nonprofit launched a pop-up series called Tales of Summer, running from June 3 through September 18 at venues across the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and Harlem, mixing classics, documentaries, a New York premiere, and three free outdoor screenings. Two of those outdoor dates have landed in Riverside Park and on Amsterdam Avenue between West 109th and 110th Streets, co-presented with neighborhood partners including Friends of Morningside Park, the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District, and the West 111th Street Block Association.
Deutchman has been direct about why the series exists before the theater does. "All of our pop-up series are based on the fact that we want the neighborhood to understand the kind of programming that we want to do when we open the film center," he told a reporter in June. For a project that will eventually ask people to buy memberships, that is not incidental marketing. It is the audience-building phase of a business plan, done in public, for free, more than two years ahead of opening night.
September 18 is the tell
Here is where the story stops being two separate calendars and becomes one. Riverside Park Conservancy runs its own long-standing festival, Summer on the Hudson, now in its 24th year, with more than 400 free events between West 59th and 181st Streets from May through September. For 2026, the Conservancy folded a new partner into that lineup: Uptown Film Center will present a special outdoor screening near the Red Clay Tennis Courts around West 96th Street on September 18, the same date that closes the nonprofit's own Tales of Summer run.
That is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is a theater that does not yet have walls getting written into the neighborhood's most established free event calendar, on the same night it wraps its own independent series. Before the Uptown Film Center screens a single ticketed film in its own building, it will have already appeared inside two separate institutional calendars in one summer, plus the AMC Lincoln Square 13, where it ran a spring series called Uptown Kids featuring family titles at $5 a ticket, supported by city funds and Council Member Shaun Abreu's office.
What the neighborhood lost, and why this fills a specific gap
The Upper West Side has been without a full-time independent theater since Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the six-screen house at 68th and Broadway, closed in early 2018 after more than three decades as a home for international and arthouse film. Deutchman has said the new name reflects that the Uptown Film Center will be the only full-time art film theater north of Lincoln Center once it opens. Krieger has described the long-term plan as a membership model similar to Film Forum or Film at Lincoln Center, a structure that depends on an audience already primed to show up.
That is the piece worth sitting with if you live here and have watched the Metro sit empty for twenty years. The theater's future business model is not being tested with a soft launch after the ribbon cutting. It is being tested now, on a folding screen in a park, with the same neighbors who will eventually decide whether to become paying members.
The rest of your August, mapped
Whatever brings you outside this month, the calendar is unusually full right now. Here is what is still ahead, drawn from Riverside Park Conservancy's Summer on the Hudson schedule and the City Parks Foundation's SummerStage lineup, which is marking its own 40th anniversary this year.
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Every Thursday in August | Movies on the Waterfront | 145th Street Lawn, Riverside Park |
| Saturday, August 15 | Fly NYC kite festival | Pier I at West 70th Street |
| Saturday, August 15 | Blues Traveler, SummerStage | Central Park |
| Thursday, August 20 | Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Marquis Hill, SummerStage | Central Park |
| Saturday, August 22 | Locomotive Open House | Locomotive Lawn at West 61st Street |
| Friday, August 28 | Riverside Comedy Club, hosted by Nat Towsen | Pier I at West 70th Street |
| Friday, September 18 | Uptown Film Center outdoor screening, part of Summer on the Hudson | Near the Red Clay Tennis Courts, West 96th Street |
The Metropolitan Opera also has multiple SummerStage dates running through August, worth checking against the current schedule since opera nights tend to draw earlier crowds than the rock and comedy bills.
A theater rebuilding itself in public
None of this means the Metro Theater is close to opening. Four floors and five screens do not get built on donor goodwill and a folding screen in Riverside Park. But the way this particular reopening is unfolding, event by event, block by block, across two summers before a single wall goes up, says something about how this neighborhood tends to bring its landmarks back. Not quietly, and not all at once. In public, with the neighbors invited, long before the building itself is ready to receive them.
If you have lived here through the Metro's dark years, September 18 near the Red Clay Tennis Courts is worth putting on the calendar. It is the closest thing to a preview this project has offered yet.
Ann Ferguson, LLC has spent years watching this neighborhood's landmarks change hands and change purpose, from prewar buildings to storefronts to, now, a theater rebuilding itself one summer at a time. If you are curious what a specific Upper West Side building or block is actually worth in today's market, Ann Ferguson, LLC offers a complimentary market evaluation, no obligation attached.
