Transformation
Renovations sought to retain, and heighten, the opulence of the building’s original design. The theater's original "Wonder" Morton pipe organ was restored; gold-plated ornamentation and crystal chandeliers were added to the interior. According to United Church’s website, “authentic Louis XV and XVI furnishings” were also added to enhance the building’s elegance. Red carpet was installed. Posters, featuring portraits of Rev. Ike alongside famous lines from his sermons, and accompanying altars were added to the theater lobby. The famous lines include: “I am NOT other people’s opinions” and “When you discover who you are, it doesn’t matter what you’ve been.” The outer marquee was used to advertise the starting time of Sunday services (2:45pm) while the inner marquee read: “Come on in or smile as you pass.”
A major change made to the building’s exterior was the addition of a prayer tower on the 176th Street side, designed to be widely visible. While the tower is primarily advertised as a sanctuary for prayer, its design also emphasizes the importance of broadcasting to a larger public. Its similarity to a radio tower provides a visual reminder of Rev. Ike’s ambitions to reach not only the surrounding neighborhoods, but also a much wider audience through broadcast media. The addition of the prayer tower was a key element in the historic movie theater’s material conversion into a proto-megachurch.
While Reverend Ike’s congregation maxed out at 5,000 members in the physical space of the United Palace Cathedral, it numbered as high as an estimated 2.5 million remote listeners and viewers at the height of Rev. Ike’s popularity. United Church broadcasted Rev. Ike’s program “The Joy of Living” to around 1,770 radio stations across the nation and ten major television markets. As Jonathan Walton notes, “Rev. Ike was one of the first African Americans to use an amphitheater as a place of worship, build an in-house video production center, and package and distribute his teachings to a national audience via television and radio.”
While Reverend Ike’s congregation maxed out at 5,000 members in the physical space of the United Palace Cathedral, it numbered as high as an estimated 2.5 million remote listeners and viewers at the height of Rev. Ike’s popularity. United Church broadcasted Rev. Ike’s program “The Joy of Living” to around 1,770 radio stations across the nation and ten major television markets. As Jonathan Walton notes, “Rev. Ike was one of the first African Americans to use an amphitheater as a place of worship, build an in-house video production center, and package and distribute his teachings to a national audience via television and radio.”
Rev. Ike’s “mediated congregation,” to use Erica Robles-Anderson’s term, played a large part in the sustained renovations and maintenance of the United Palace Cathedral. The generous financial support of this collective in-person, television and radio audience appears to have mitigated the high costs of preserving a large structure such as the United Palace. The great expense involved illustrates a neglected detail about the movie palace legacy. Robert Sklar explains, “the shocking fact, so disruptive of the myth that no historian of the movies seems ever to have uttered it…picture palaces were economic white elephants.” Romanticizing the heyday of cinemagoing overshadows the commercial realities that shaped how movie palaces were actually used in the past. Reverend Ike, and other evangelists like him, was able to successfully preserve a movie palace, in part, because of the ample donations from his devoted, distributed audience.
This page has paths:
- Histories Concealed Veronica Paredes