United Palace: A Jewel in Washington Heights
Last fall, seven Big Apple Greeter volunteers and student intern Devin Adams-George enjoyed a private tour of the United Palace in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Northern Manhattan. It was fantastic!
Our group revisited the theater’s rich history and its wonderfully eclectic design, once described by The New York Times as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco.” With 3,000 seats, United Palace is the fourth largest venue in NYC.
A few highlights from the tour:
United Palace was the last of the five “Loew’s Wonder Theatres” built in and near New York City to host both vaudeville performances and movies. One wonder: It even had an early air-cooling system before modern air conditioning.
Loew’s had quietly acquired the full block of 175th Street between Broadway and Wadsworth Avenue from 1924–1927 before building the theater. The location was chosen strategically to align with the new eastern terminus of the George Washington Bridge, providing easy access to Manhattan from New Jersey.
Designed by Thomas Lamb, a Scottish-American theater architect, to feel like a true fantasy land the theater originally opened in 1930 as the Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, complete with a Wonder Organ, one of the large-scale instruments built to accompany silent films and live shows. United Palace is working to restore its organ, the last remaining all-original version of the instrument.
After 40 years as a movie palace, the building entered a chapter as a place of worship.
In 1969, Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II—better known as Reverend Ike—saved the theater from demolition. As the story goes, he saw a movie there on a Friday, learned the building was scheduled to be torn down on Monday, and bought it over the weekend to preserve it.
He renamed it the United Palace, reflecting the site’s spiritual mission and role as a “palace” for the community. It remained an active place of worship until 2022.
Today, the United Palace has a vibrant mix of uses. It hosts major film and TV shoots, including scenes in the films John Wick, West Side Story, Tick, Tick… Boom!, and the theater scenes from TV’s Only Murders in the Building.
It also served as the venue for the 76th Annual Tony Awards in 2023. United Palace also hosts concerts, school graduations, and a beloved movie series, with some screenings introduced by actor, writer, producer, and Washington Heights resident Lin-Manuel Miranda.
During our tour, we also got to step inside the men’s and women’s lounges, go onstage to see the new movie screen, view the weight system used for the sets, and take a look at the original control panel for the theater. Truly incredible craftsmanship and history at every turn.