Though they announced that the building had been sold in 2017, yesterday, Sunshine Cinemas confirmed that it will shut down for good on Sunday, January 21.
In its time, Sunshine probably screened as many skate videos as the living room TV in your average Brooklyn skate house. Initially pioneered by Josh Stewart in the late 2000s (I think…), skate videographers from all walks of life — huge corporate companies, right down to the guy going broke repairing his VX1000 every month — flocked to Sunshine to premiere their videos. While plenty of other smaller downtown theaters dubbed skateboarders personae non gratae unless you had a backer to fork over a giant security deposit, Sunshine’s modest fees made it a go-to for anyone with a video to play.
Sunshine was a steady thread in New York skateboarding’s extracurricular life. Like China Chalet, or the belated KTV, it was a place where we all went to be, for lack of a better term, bad. And they let us live: often looking the other way on letting people sit in the aisles when it got too crowded, sneaking in adult beverages as long as it was not painfully obvious, and sometimes leaving a cloud behind once the premiere was over and people were done screaming at the screen.
Like the rest of the theaters that no longer wanted to put up with our shit, in 2016, we became unwelcome thanks to people taking this too far and deciding it was ok to do graffiti inside the theater. Until that point, it was an unlikely and indirect supporter of a culture that often lives on the fringes of employment, yet still holds value in the community that comes together for a good video premiere in an actual movie theater.
Thank you Sunshine. You will be missed, probably more and more each time someone wonders where to premiere a video not-in-a-bar, or in, …Brooklyn ;)
BUT FEAR NOT, where there is an end, there is also a new beginning, and another equally important Lower East Side institution will return next week. You can add a second floor and digital kiosks, but you can’t take the Delancey out of Delancey McDonald’s. One of the city’s most iconic Golden Arch locations will reopen BIGGER and BETTER on January 15.