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Long-awaited Alamo Drafthouse in the Financial District won’t open until summer

Plus, the city considers using drones to inspect buildings’s safety—and more intel in today’s New York Minute news roundup

By Valeria Ricciulli
28 Liberty Street, formerly known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza, where the new Financial District Alamo Drafthouse will be located.
Max Touhey |

Good morning, and welcome to New York Minute, a new roundup of the New York City news you need to know about today. Send stories you think should be included to tips@curbed.com.

Alamo Drafthouse’s opening in the Financial District is pushed back again

A long-in-the-works plan to open an Alamo Drafthouse in the Financial District’s landmarked 28 Liberty Street have been postponed, again. It was initially set to open in 2018, then at the end of 2019—and now, the New York Post reports, it will debut this summer.

The plans for the Austin-based movie theater—which already has a popular outpost in Downtown Brooklyn’s City Point and will soon open another in Staten Island—were first announced in 2017, and call for a 40,000-square-foot theater with ten or more screens on the Liberty Street tower’s third below-ground level.

Formerly known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza, now 28 Liberty Street, the landmarked building has been undergoing a transformation since 2013, when Fosun International bought the building from JP Morgan Chase, planning to overhaul its retail space and public plaza. Designed by Skidmore, Owing, & Merrill, the revamp was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission back in 2015.

The Post says the delay in opening the theater might be due to the complexity of building below ground in a landmarked building.

And in other news...

  • The MTA says plans to make several stations more accessible will be scuttled if the city doesn’t deliver $3 billion in funding.
  • More bed bugs have been spotted in an MTA tower in Queens.
  • Following facade deaths, the city considers using drones to inspect buildings’s safety.
  • Can preservation hurt cities? The New York Times’s editorial board took an in-depth look, as Washington D.C. prevents historic neighborhoods homeowners from installing rooftop solar panels.
  • The City Council will look into whether the NYPD is conducting racially biased harassment in issuing 90 percent of “jaywalking” tickets to black and Latino New Yorkers.
  • Communities in different NYC neighborhoods push back against the city’s rezoning efforts.
  • The city will ask a court to allow replacement of a homeless shelter nonprofit operator being investigated for potential fraud.
  • The MTA hasn’t yet appointed members to a panel tasked to determine congestion pricing tolls.

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