A trying adieu

It's always disheartening to hear of theater closures, but news of the Trylon's desecration particularly saddens me. Not only was it a rare well-preserved art deco beauty still operating as a single-screen theater--it was one of my locals. I know, time marches on--but would it have killed the new owners to at least leave the gorgeous Trylon mosaics intact? If the apartment house with the Trylon and Perisphere stonework motif on 108th Street in Corona ever gets torn down, I'm gonna have a serious meltdown.



While never a rock venue, the Trylon does have some tenuous rock & roll connections. Charlottle Lesher--a.k.a. "Mama Ramone"--ran an art gallery called the Art Garden adjacent to the theater. According to Jim Bessman's Ramones: An American Band (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), her son Jeffrey "play[ed] drums in the basement of his mother's art gallery...next door to the Trylon Cinema on Queens Boulevard, where he lived after she kicked him out of her apartment in the Birchwood Towers, for his own good." More on what became of young Jeffrey in the next post.