Rosemary Theatre

The Rosemary Theater was a Chinatown movie theater located at 133 Canal Street. In the ‘80s, it showed Chinese language movies from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. These films were sometimes subtitled in English and also Chinese for Cantonese speakers. In 1988, the theater hosted the Asian American International Film Festival and live opera performances. In the ‘90s, patronage steeply declined due to emerging advanced technologies, such as DVDs. As a result, the Rosemary Theater shifted to showing pornographic films to try to stay afloat and relevant but was forced to close in 1996. It is now the home of the Mahayana Buddhist temple.