The Cornwall Local

December 14, 2007

Talks of reopening the theatre
By Margaret Menge

The Storm King Theatre opened on July 3 of 1935. It was an event announced in big letters on the front page of The Cornwall Local the week before; and an event that inspired the editor to welcome the theatre with a Page One editorial that referred to cinema as a “great educational force.”

We might not see movies in just such a way anymore, but we might be able to see them again at the Storm King Theatre. Barbara DeFina, a movie producer who lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, has been meeting with Ray Yannone, the owner of the Storm King Theatre building, to look at how the old theatre might be restored, and be re-opened as a one-screen movie house. DeFina and a friend of hers, who’s been involved in running other movie houses in New York and New Jersey, have been negotiating with Yannone, and looking over an architect’s proposal. “Most of what it needs right now is clearing out,” says DeFina. “If the Planning Board smiles on us, I don’t think it’s going to be a complicated renovation.”

Ray Yannone bought the Storm King Theatre Building in 1997. The building was condemned, with stones that had wrapped the façade falling off onto the street. He spent the next year on renovations to the exterior, and the outside of the building now looks very much as it did when the cinema first opened in the summer of 1935.