Bespoke readers who live around the Lafayette Theatre neighborhood in Central Harlem have noted that the current retail space at the remaining intact building has closed down and rumors have been floating around about its future fate. The top photo shows the three intact buildings located between 131st Street and 132nd Street back in 1937 on ACP/7th Avenue. At that point in time, the Ubangi Club was housed in the building at the south corner of the avenue but a decade before, the legendary Connie's Inn was founded in the same spot:
LINK. There was a matching building to the north corner of the block but one can see in the second photo that a parking lot stands there now.
As for the actual Lafayette Theatre, the church that owns the building decided to tear down the classic facade details back in 1990 and the almost windowless contemporary exterior remains today:
LINK. Now that C-town has closed down, there have been reports amongst residences of the neighborhood that the entire complex might have been sold, will be torn down and eventually become an 8-story condo complex. Does anyone have additional information on this development? Nothing has been confirmed but several sources have sent messages to our inbox in reference to this bit of news.
Archival photo courtesy NYPL
A family member of mine worked in the supermarket.The property is indeed being sold. The supermarket knew about it for months and purposely kept their stock purchases to a bare minimum until their time to move out.They had been warning many of the employees ahead of time. I have no further details about who is negotiating the deal.
ReplyDeleteYet again something with a bit of history and character behind it treated like garbage. I think this is the same place:
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What a shame that it wasn't taken care of to begin with.
I don’t have it from official sources but from what I understand, the church owned the whole block. It will be developed as a single large project, condos I believe. And the church will have a space in the new development. It isn’t clear to me whether the church retains partial ownership or just some sort of rights to some space.
ReplyDeleteNot sad to see the C-town gone at all. That place was filthy and had ton of expired food.The Fine Fair on 8th has always been a much better choice if you can get past the christian music.
ReplyDeleteI hope they start the construction soon.