You climb a narrow staircase behind what used to be the Ditmars Theatre's candy counter and step into a room that smells like hot metal and old paper. The Museum of the Moving Image keeps the polished exhibits downstairs. This attic space — opened quietly for self-guided visits on weekday afternoons — is where projectionist Angelo Maltese stored everything he couldn't bear to discard between 1947 and 1992. You're walking through his refusal to let go.
The Carbon-Arc Lamphouse Still Wired to Nothing
The Simplex projectors hulk in the corner like industrial sculptures, their carbon-arc lamphouses still mounted even though no theater has used carbon rods since the eighties. You can see the scorch marks inside the housings where the rods burned at 6000 degrees to throw light through celluloid. Someone left a pair of asbestos gloves draped over one lamphouse. The leather is stiff and cracked. If you crouch down you'll notice the floor tiles beneath these machines are a different color — bleached from decades of heat radiating downward during four-show days. The electrical conduit still snakes up the wall but terminates in a junction box that goes nowhere. It's the mechanical equivalent of a sentence that just stops.
Handwritten Cue Sheets in Three Different Inks
The filing cabinets along the east wall contain cue sheets for films that haven't screened in sixty years. Maltese wrote them himself in a slanted cursive that gets harder to read as you move through the decades — his handwriting tightening as his eyesight presumably failed. He used different colored inks to denote different types of cues: blue for reel changes, red for sound adjustments, black for notes to himself. One sheet for a 1953 noir includes the note "watch gate at reel 4 — emulsion soft." Another reminds him to "start exhaust fan before main feature Saturdays" because the crowd heat became unbearable. You're reading the internal monologue of someone who ran film for forty-five years in the same booth.
The Splice Bins That Reveal What Broke
Three wooden bins hold film scraps organized by decade. The fifties bin contains mostly nitrate stock — you can tell by the way it's gone amber and brittle. The seventies bin has long strips of polyester film with visible splice repairs, each one marking a moment when the film snapped mid-screening. Maltese kept the damaged sections rather than discarding them. Some splices have dates penciled on the leader: "Aug 12 73 — broke during chase scene." The bins sit on a worktable scarred with razor cuts and adhesive residue. There's a splicer still clamped to the table edge, its blade rusted into position. The whole setup feels like a pathology lab for film that died during projection.
The Changeover Cue Marks You Can Actually See
A section of wall displays 35mm film frames blown up to poster size. Maltese mounted them to show the changeover cue marks — those small circles that appear in the upper right corner to signal the projectionist to start the second projector. You've seen these marks your entire moviegoing life without knowing what they were. Here they're isolated and labeled: "first cue — prepare second projector," "second cue — execute changeover." The frames come from different films but the cue marks are always identical, always in the same position. It's the secret handshake between film and projectionist. The light coming through the attic's north window hits these frames around three in the afternoon and you can see the grain structure of the original film stock.
The Rewind Station Where Time Ran Backward
The horizontal rewind station occupies an entire corner. Film reels of various sizes sit stacked on wall-mounted spindles, some still threaded through the rewind arms as if Maltese stepped away mid-task. The crank handles are smooth from use, the metal worn down to a different color where hands gripped them thousands of times. A film can sits open on the station with leader tape spilling out — white leader marked "DITMARS" in block letters. The station faces away from the projectors, toward a window that looks out over Steinway Street. You can picture the routine: screen the film, rewind it facing the window, watch the neighborhood while running time backward through your hands.
The Ventilation Ducts That Pulled Heat and Smoke
Look up and you'll see the original ventilation system Maltese rigged to handle the heat from carbon-arc projection. The ducts are oversized — twice the diameter of normal HVAC — because carbon-arc lamps generated extraordinary heat and produced smoke from the burning rods. He routed the ducts through the attic and out through the roof. You can still see soot residue inside the duct openings. The system includes a manual damper he could adjust based on outside temperature. In summer he'd open it fully and the booth would still hit ninety degrees. Someone left a thermometer hanging from one duct. It's stuck at eighty-seven degrees, the mercury frozen in place like everything else up here.
Practical Notes
The space operates as an extension of the Museum of the Moving Image's collection but keeps irregular hours — generally accessible during museum visiting hours on weekdays, though it's worth confirming before making a special trip. You'll need to check in at the main museum desk and they'll direct you to the access stairway. No formal tours run through the attic but museum staff occasionally lead small group visits. The Steinway Street subway stop on the M and R trains puts you a short walk from the museum. The neighborhood has enough coffee shops and Greek bakeries to make the trip worthwhile even if the attic happens to be closed. Admission is included with general museum entry. The space isn't climate-controlled so dress accordingly — it runs hot in summer and cold in winter, just like it did when Maltese worked up there.
Tags: #TheOddEdit #Astoria #NewYorkCity #ProjectionBooth #FilmHistory #35mmFilm #MovieTheaters #CarbonArcProjection #MuseumOfTheMovingImage #CinemaHistory #ObscureMuseums #QueensNYC #FilmPreservation #ProjectionistLife #ForgottenSpaces
Sources consulted: atlasobscura.com · timeout.com · nytimes.com
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