The Crescent, the New Crescent, and the Gem Theatre

Before Harlem Hospital, a theater stood on West 135th, near the corner of Lenox Avenue. Designed by architect Maximilian Zypkes, it was originally called the Crescent Theatre and showed plays and vaudeville. The name and mission changed: first to the New Crescent after it changed owners and then, finally, it settled as a movie cinema, the Gem Theatre, around the mid-1920s. It isn’t clear exactly where it stood: a 1941 Harlem Columnist for the Atlanta Daily World identified it at 58 West 135th, however an old advertisement that is shown on the website Black Cinemagoing announces that it was to be opened at 36-38 West 135th. What is certain is that it was west of Fifth Avenue and a stone’s throw east of Lenox.

The Crescent produced plays with an all-black cast as early as 1909, the column “Footlite Flickers” in a 1941 edition of Atlanta Daily World claims. By the mid-1920s when it was the Gem, it had become one of Harlem’s popular movie theaters and touted its staff of black projectionists as per the above advertisement in the Black-American weekly newspaper the New York Age.

In 1926, it showed Ten Nights in a Bar Room which it advertised in the New York Age. The film was one of several adaptations of a popular temperance novel of the time. This one featured a black cast with famed stage actor Charles Gilpin playing the lead character of a wayward drinker who neglects his family responsibilities. Ten Nights in a Bar Room was one of only four films produced by the short-lived Colored Players Film Corporation, an independent film production company based in Philadelphia that made silent films featuring all Black casts.

The Gem Theatre seemed to disappear by the late 1920s and the buildings and block became the base of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. No photos seem to exist of the Crescent or the Gem and just a few mentions in the Black Press remain of these pioneering theaters that once entertained Harlemites in the space where Harlem Hospital now stands. (ER/KD)