Paramount Theater, Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Paramount Theater is a former movie palace at 1 University Plaza at the intersection of Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues in downtown Brooklyn, New York. Constructed in 1928, the venue was sister to Paramount Theater, Manhattan. The rococo-designed theater had 4,084 seats. Long Island University purchased the structure for part of its Brooklyn Campus in 1960 and converted the theater into a gymnasium in 1962. The Wurlitzer organ in the Brooklyn Paramount, Opus 1984, is a four manual, 26 rank instrument with 1,838 pipes and continues to be used at LIU sporting events. In April 2015, LIU announced a 49-year lease of the Paramount to a company controlled by Bruce Ratner and Mikhail Prokhorov, owners of the Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Nets. They plan an extensive renovation costing about $50 million to convert the auditorium back to a theater for live events. Many of the original Rapp & Rapp architectural details remain and will be preserved, as will the Wurlitzer organ. Initially expected to be completed in mid 2019, in 2020 the renovation project was reported to have been delayed.