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Loew’s Paradise and RKO Fordham usually showed movies soon after they made their openings in Manhattan. Then the movies worked their way into the neighborhoods in houses of descending sizes and ticket prices. Movies held on in the neighborhoods for weeks. This was double feature territory, B movies filling the slate, like Boston Blackie’s Chinese Venture starring Chester Morris. When announcements were made for the Academy Awards, Best Picture nominees were shown as double features, as was the case in a pairing of 1954 Best Picture candidates, an unforgettable double feature I saw at the Loew’s Grand, Roman Holiday and Shane .
    Only when we reached dating age and certain proprieties were honored — you wanted to show you were appropriate and organized — did we bother to check the times of a movie to see it from the beginning. The common line while watching a movie was, “Did we come in here?” and if we really liked the movie we watched it to the end again.
    In a vanished movie-going custom, if no seats were available, people would stand in the side aisles waiting for someone to leave and until then we watched the movie standing.
    Going to the movies with family members was necessary, depending upon how old you were. Going to the movies with friends was excellent, except when we were of an age when we had to sit in the children’s section presided over by matrons dressed in white and armed with flashlights to pick us out if we hummed through our candy boxes. Going to the movies when you were too old to get in at children’s prices, but too young to be allowed to sit with the adults was a dark period in one’s moviegoing life. Going to the movies on a date was also excellent, unless you ran into someone from your family, or friends who snickered.
    Stories of adventures at the movies began to circulate in the neighborhood, the storyteller usually one of the local big shots, someone a little older, or one of the better ballplayers, and the main story line went something like this. The big shot went prowling the balcony of the Loew’s Paradise on a Saturday afternoon, picked up a girl who was sitting there, started to neck, and felt her up. The story was always somehow about the balcony of the Loew’s Paradise, not even the RKO Fordham or the Loew’s Grand. This was a recurring story of the neighborhood big shots. Necking with a girl you picked up in the Loew’s Paradise was astonishing to me, especially the feeling up part. Here’s the thing. I believed those stories. And it never happened to me. Not that I tried. And I wouldn’t have. Which is why they were the big shots.
    The Loew’s Paradise Theater opened in 1929, a fantasy palace, madly baroque in an Italianate style with a ceiling of stars in a sky of moving clouds. The Paradise was huge, 3,885 seats. A sold out showing of a popular movie meant a commensurate crowd filling the Great Hall lobby and into the outer lobby. This kind of crowd formed for The Three Musketeers in 1948 with Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, Van Heflin as Athos, Gig Young as Porthos, Robert Coote as Aramis, and with June Allyson, Lana Turner, and Angela Lansbury.
    The theater was designed by John Eberson, who specialized in these “atmospheric” movie palaces as they were called. His son, Drew Eberson, wrote, “I believe that even if we had the financing today we wouldn’t be able to find the artisans who could create another Paradise.” We in the Bronx thought it was unique. However, Loew’s erected similar Eberson-designed movie palaces in New York: the Valencia in Queens, the Kings in Brooklyn, and the 175th Street in Manhattan. Well, it was unique to us, this elegant place in our very neighborhood.
    The Ascot Theater, tiny by comparison, was a couple of blocks south of the Paradise and less than a block from our apartment. The Ascot was one of the first art movie houses in New York, the only art house in