Anco Cinema
demolished theater at 254 West 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York City
The Anco Cinema was a former Broadway theatre turned cinema at 254 West 42nd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues in Manhattan, New York City. It opened in 1904 and was originally named the Lew Fields Theatre. It continued to operate as a playhouse under various names until it was converted into a movie theatre in 1930. Its block was famous for its concentration of Broadway theatres turned cinemas. After World War II, the street declined and the Anco Cinema eventually became a pornography venue. It closed as a cinema in 1988 and was gutted for retail use. The building was demolished in 1997.
Playhouse
In 1903, producer Fred R. Hamlin and producer/director Julian Mitchell had a big Broadway hit with The Wizard of Oz, a musical staging of the L. Frank Baum story, and they had another with Babes in Toyland, a Victor Herbert operetta, later in the year. In 1904, Oscar Hammerstein I announced plans to build his eighth Manhattan theater (after the Harlem and Manhattan opera houses, the Olympia and Victoria music halls, and the Columbus, Olympia and Republic theaters), on vacant land he had recently bought at 254–58 West 42nd Street, calling it the National. It would be designed by Albert E. Westover, a Philadelphia architect who designed several theaters in that city for vaudeville operator B. F. Keith and is credited with Hammerstein's Republic.
“Anco Cinema” enters the record as demolished theater at 254 West 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York City. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Anco, Cinema and demolished can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Anco Cinema” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Anco, Cinema and demolished provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110092094. Authority coordinates are 40.757, -73.988. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1930, 1988 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anco Cinema” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.