Brooklyn’s Pavilion movie theater will be converted into apartments and include a smaller, high-end theater, according to the building developer and an application filed with the city’s Department of Buildings yesterday.
The Park Slope building, often the subject of neighborhood ire for reportedly shabby service over the years, will include 24 apartments on six stories — one story higher than the current facade. The addition will be pushed back from the roofline, said Ethan Geto, a spokesman for Hidrock Realty, the Manhattan developer who purchased the space on Prospect Park West.
“It’s going to be renovated, but that structure is going to remain,” Geto said. “They are working very hard, and hope and expect, to have a new, better movie theater in the building. While it may be smaller, we think it will be more heavily utilized.”
Geto described the new theater planned for the space as “more sophisticated” and said it will show mainly independent and arthouse films. The space will also contain some unspecified retail.
“This is still fluid and it could go a number of different ways,” Geto added.
Hidrock hopes to go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission in the next few months, because the building is in a landmarked neighborhood though it’s not one itself, and start the renovation and restoration sometime in the late fall or early winter, he said.
The Pavilion theater has earned a reputation for being old and dirty, collecting nearly 200 one and two star reviews on the online review service Yelp. And several instances of a bedbug infestation were reported in 2009, 2010, and 2012, according to The Bedbug Registry, a public online database where people can report sightings. ?
