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Religious Conversions on Broadway

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The United Palace Cathedral is not the only movie palace that has been converted into a church. In fact there are a great number of examples of religious transformations of film exhibition spaces across the United States. From Los Angeles to New York, Boston to Birmingham, movie palaces built during the first thirty years of the twentieth century have been deemed a suitable backdrop for religious service. This compatibility is suggested in the reverential names movie palaces were given during their “secular” period, such as “cathedrals of film” and “temples of democracy.” Atmospheric movie palace emphasized otherworldliness, which temporarily elevated moviegoers from the drudgery of the real world. The architecture of movie palaces repurposed as churches suggests a link between this and other worlds, between the physical and spiritual realms.

Religious conversion of movie palaces is widespread in Los Angeles’s Historic Theater District. Formerly Loew’s State Theatre is now home to a Brazilian Pentecostal church called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), and has been re-christened “La Catedral de Fe (The Cathedral of Faith).” Stephen Barber has written dramatically about his experience of sitting in the State Theater, making connections between the palace’s earlier role and its latest incarnation as a “cultist” church:
…residual filmic hallucinations still hang suspended in the air, meshing with the religious visions of the hard-core cultists, each seated in isolation, interspersed with accidental spectators, across the auditorium’s stalls, awaiting the beginning of the hourly services… … the crystal chandeliers about the balcony level appear oblivious to their new status, of illuminating religious rather than cinematic enflamings… (Source)
Barber’s account exoticizes the transition from “cathedrals of film” to “cathedrals of faith.” In fact, religious leaders were able to use the excessive qualities of movie palaces to suture them into other media networks, through radio and television broadcasts, unseen to Barber as he sits in the “abandoned” movie theater searching for ghosts. Invisible to the theorist still looking only for the presence and absence of film is how preachers not only used the excess of movie palaces to project fantasies of wealth, similar to how they were used by exhibitors during the classical Hollywood period, but also how they transformed the mediated experiences of the space.

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