RKO Albee Theater Becomes Albee Square Mall (Brooklyn Cultural Landmark)

The Albee Square Mall opened in 1980 on the Fulton Street pedestrian plaza, immediately becoming a prominent spot in Downtown Brooklyn. Construction on the project began three years earlier when its namesake, the RKO Albee Theater, was demolished to make way for the development.

Albee Theater Opened in 1925 | Photo Courtesy of Frank Tilelli & William Gabel

Albee Theater Lobby (Courtesy CinemaTreasures.org – User Tinseltoes

Albee Theater Seating (Courtesy CinemaTreasures.org – User Tinseltoes

Edward Franklin Albee, a promoter, impresario and father of the famous playwright, built the Albee Theater in 1925, during the peak of the vaudeville era. With a beaux-arts exterior and an interior that featured crystal chandeliers in the lobby, paintings from Albee’s private collection and seating for 2,000, the Albee Theater sought to rebrand vaudeville and attract more affluent audiences.

After the theater’s demolition in 1978, the vacant space was developed by the Urban Development Corp., a city agency that worked to provide financial aid for the acquisition, construction or improvement of industrial, commercial, public and cultural spaces. The mall was designed by Gruen Associates, a firm founded in 1951 by Austrian architect Victor Gruen. Based in Los Angeles, Gruen and his firm designed the first suburban open-air mall near Detroit in 1954. Two years later, Gruen completed his best-known work – the 800,000-square-foot Southdale Mall in Minnesota.

Gruen is largely credited with inventing the suburban shopping mall as we know it; writer Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that Gruen “may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century.”

Albee Square Mall (Courtesy Gowanus Lounge)

With an unassuming glass exterior, Albee Square Mall might pale in comparison to some of Gruen’s other projects. However, along with its companion, Fulton Mall, Albee Square became a cultural landmark that nurtured Brooklyn’s rising middle class, a burgeoning hip-hop culture and rejuvenated an important commercial district.

Leonard Grunstein, working as an Assistant Corporation Counsel, helped draft the land disposition agreement and ground lease structure that enabled the development of the Albee Square Mall in the late 1970s.

Morris Grunstein Biography

Morris Grunstein

Born around 1926 in Pilicia, a town in Poland, Morris Grunstein, a scion of the illustrious Yonason Eybeshitz family, was sent to a Nazi labor camp in 1940 and managed to escape four years later during the death march to Germany. Weighing only 60 pounds, he traveled to Italy, where he recuperated and studied to be an electrician. In 1950, he moved to Milwaukee WI, where he eventually married and started a family. Initially working at a foundry, he found a job as a master electrician in Westinghouse and rose quickly through the ranks. He gave up his chosen profession as an electrician to move his family to New York in 1958, settling in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, in order to provide his children with greater opportunities.

After some time in New York, he decided to move the family to Queens, eventually owning and operating supermarkets in Laurelton and Forest Hills, which he converted to kosher emporiums that were closed on the Sabbath. One of his stores, Good Food in Laurelton, appears in a history book on several neighborhoods in Queens.

Morris Grunstein Storefront – Good Food in Laurelton

Morris Grunstein Store – Inside “Good Food” in Laurelton

A wise, confident, religious and worldly individual, he instilled an undeniable desire to excel in all his children: Nettie attended Bet Yaakov High on a full academic scholarship, while Harry went to BMT in Israel and graduated magna cum laude from Queens College, eventually earning a combination MPA/MPH at Columbia. Three of his many grandchildren, are equally, if not more, impressive: a gifted surgeon, a dentist and a doctor in clinical psychology. All those years ago, he made the choice to move halfway across the country, sacrificing his own aspirations for those of his kids in order to make sure they could have the opportunity to succeed.

Mr. Grunstein suffered from Parkinson’s for several years, and passed on in 1995, but left an indelible legacy of hard work, love and faith.

Morris Grunstein