Time Travel Via VHS: An Afternoon at the Gramercy Theatre in NYC in 1988...

Back in 1988, while I was working as an assistant manager at the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan, I purchased my first camcorder. It was a General Electric CG 9911, a big, shoulder mount VHS model. Eager to test it out, I brought this marvel of technology to the theater and spent the day torturing my fellow employees with it.

The resulting footage has somehow survived the passage of almost thirty years and exists in my collection of VHS tapes in the form of this rather poor quality copy, which I recently rediscovered. It's several generations removed from an original recording which wasn't all that good to begin with, so it's pretty grainy and glitchy. But as it's probably the only surviving video of the Gramercy from that time, it has some small value to me and will perhaps be of interest to those who worked there during those years.

I left the Gramercy not too long after this footage was shot and fell out of touch with the other staff members, so I can't say what became of most of them. Of those seen in this video, the names I still remember are: Maud St. Preux, the assistant manager in the red dress seen peering through the auditorium doors at Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the feature that was playing at the time, Morton Tankus, the bearded assistant manager who is seen conducting an inventory of concession stand supplies, Ruth Honor, the concession stand attendant, and Evelyn Perna, the cashier, who I believe passed away a year or so after this footage was shot. I'm afraid I've forgotten the last names of the other two employees in the video: Willie, the security guard, and Jose, the usher seen picking up his paycheck.

The appearance of Roger Rabbit in this footage should be enough to identify it as being of 1988 vintage, but if more evidence is needed, check out the promotional material on display in the lounge, including posters for Die Hard, Big and Cocktail. As for the arcade games, if memory serves, both had been in place in the Gramercy lounge for several years by this time. The Ms. Pacman game was just barely useable due to image burn-in on the monitor. The machine which is seen turned to the wall is an out-of-service Robotron game. I spent many hours on that one and probably bear some responsibility for wearing it out.

If I'm not mistaken, the Gramercy Theatre closed as a movie house in the early 90s. The theater itself still stands, but it's a music venue now and, judging from the photos I've seen of it online, much changed from the way it was back when this footage was shot.

Looking at the footage now, I wish I'd spent less time in the basement of the building, in the manager's office and employee's room, and had instead gotten some shots of the outside of the theater and of the auditorium with the lights up. But at the time I had no way of knowing that this would become my only record of the years I spent at the Gramercy Theatre, and no way of knowing that I would live long enough to become nostalgic for those days.

https://youtu.be/A44pTi2tdn8

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