Elgin Theater
The Elgin Theater, before 1982
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| Address | 175 Eighth Avenue |
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| Location | Chelsea, New York City, United States |
| Coordinates | 40°44′34″N 74°00′02″W / 40.742766°N 74.000545°W |
| Public transit | 14th St./Eighth Ave (NYC Subway) |
| Type | Theater |
| Genre(s) | Cinema |
| Capacity | 600 |
| Construction | |
| Built | 1941 |
| Opened | 1942 |
| Renovated | 1982 |
| Closed | 1978 |
| Architect | Simon Zelnik |
The Elgin Theater is the former name of the building now known as the Joyce Theater, located on the corner of 19th Street and Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. The theater showed films from its opening in 1942 until 1978. It is credited with inventing the midnight movie. After a gut renovation, the building reopened in 1982 as the Joyce Theater, a 472-seat dance theater.
The theater opened in 1942. It was designed in the Art Moderne style by Simon Zelnik and had seating for 600.
The Elgin opened as a first-run cinema. In the 1950s through the late 1960s it presented Spanish-language cinema and theatrical productions.
In 1968, Ben Barenholtz assumed management of the theater and converted it to a repertory and art film house. The Elgin soon became noted for the innovation and variety of its programming, which ranged from revivals of classic Hollywood films, to experimental works by Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol, to presentations of emerging filmmakers such as Jonathan Demme and Martin Scorsese.
Around 1970, Steve Gould and Chuck Zlatkin took over management of the theater in partnership with Barenholtz and continued similar programming. The Elgin is reputed to be the first theater to show midnight movies. In late 1970, the first midnight movie shown at The Elgin was Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealist western El Topo. Barenholtz, recalled, "I was told by the experts: 'Who's going to come see a film at midnight? You're out of your mind.' But within two years, there wasn't a city in the country that didn't have a midnight movie going."El Topo premiered at The Elgin on December 17, 1970 and ran continuously seven days a week until the end of June 1971.
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