Kips Bay is not, by temperament, a neighborhood that marches. It is a district of hospital residents, doormen buildings and people who know exactly which Fairway aisle has the good olive oil. It has, for a quarter-century, also had a movie theater, and it turns out that is the thing it is prepared to fight about.
The theater is the AMC Kips Bay 15, at 570 Second Avenue, between East 31st and 32nd Streets. Its prospective landlord is NYU Langone Health, which, as Assembly Member Keith Powers disclosed in August, moved to acquire the site without telling the neighborhood. Its current champion, as of Saturday, is AMC’s chief executive himself.
“AMC Theatres wants to stay”
In a letter reported Saturday by Variety, AMC chief executive Adam Aron put the matter about as bluntly as a publicly traded company ever puts anything. “AMC Theatres wants to stay in Kips Bay,” he wrote, adding that NYU Langone “wants us gone” and that the chain’s proposals to remain “have fallen on closed minds.” The theater opened on May 14, 1999, and AMC took it over in 2006, according to Variety, which described it as the chain’s second-largest multiplex in the city and, on some summer days, among the ten most attended AMC locations in the country. The Fairway downstairs and a bank branch in the building are also expected to close, Variety reported.
The letter is a direct reply to the hospital system’s version of events. NYU Langone did not send anyone to the Community Board 6 meeting on October 8 where the theater was discussed, The City Reporter noted, but it did send a statement asserting that AMC had “expressed interest in leaving.” AMC’s spokesman, Ryan Noonan, answered that one in six words: “To be clear, we want to stay.” Showtimes are currently listed through January 3, 2027.
So the board, the borough and a petition with thousands of signatures are now refereeing a dispute in which the tenant and the incoming owner disagree about the basic fact of whether the tenant wants to leave. It is, as these things go, an unusually clean disagreement.
The Borough President draws a line
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal has picked his side, and he has picked a tool to go with it. In an October 5 statement, he wrote, “We come to this place for magic,” and then turned from Hollywood to land use: “I will not approve any prospective rezoning” of the site “without the inclusion of a cinema.” He said he would also look for an affordable grocery, which is to say a successor to the Fairway, and credited the Save Kips Bay Coalition for organizing.
He was careful, as land-use people are, about what the zoning actually is. The site, a two-story building, has been mapped R8 with a C2-5 commercial overlay since 1961, he noted, the same year Breakfast at Tiffany’s premiered. The line is charming, but the point underneath it is practical. A Borough President’s recommendation in the city’s land-use review is advisory, but it is not nothing, and a hospital that wants to build big on Second Avenue may need the review.
May. The zoning consultant George Janes told The City Reporter that NYU Langone might not need a rezoning at all to do something significant with the property, which would leave the Borough President’s leverage largely rhetorical. That question, rather than the letters, is the one to watch.
The hospital’s case
It would be too easy to cast NYU Langone as the villain of a Nora Ephron picture, and the neighborhood’s elected officials have mostly resisted doing so. The hospital system’s argument, as conveyed through spokesperson Arielle Sklar to The City Reporter, starts from a real problem. Emergency department visits at NYU Langone are up 11 percent since Mount Sinai Beth Israel closed in April 2025. A medical center that serves the whole East Side has a legitimate interest in the blocks around it, and NYU Langone is also taking over the former COCO-MAT space on Lexington Avenue between 31st and 32nd Streets, the outlet reported.
The complaint from elected officials is less about the hospital’s needs than its manners. In August, Powers and six colleagues, among them Rep. Jerry Nadler, State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, Council Members Virginia Maloney and Harvey Epstein, Assembly Member Micah Lasher and Hoylman-Sigal, wrote to NYU Langone that “we were disappointed to learn that this acquisition took place without any notification of, or engagement with, local elected officials or residents,” according to amNewYork. The timeline itself is muddled: Powers described a purchase made more than a year ago, while The City Reporter reported this month that the deal is under contract and set to close early next year.
What’s next for the block
The practical calendar is short. AMC’s listings run to early January. Powers has said the Fairway has roughly five years left on its lease and that NYU Langone has not made commitments about the store’s future. Gonzalez and Maloney attended the board meeting, and the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association, through Jessica Lavoie, has joined the chorus.
There is a version of this that ends in a compromise neighborhoods have seen before: a medical building with a smaller cinema in its base, or a grocery store under a clinic, with a ribbon-cutting that everyone attends and no one quite enjoys. There is another version that ends with a dark marquee on Second Avenue and a lesson about how institutions buy real estate in this city. AMC has now put its preference in writing. The next move is NYU Langone’s, and it has so far preferred to make its moves quietly.
Featured image: Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, then a state senator, speaking with a constituent on the Upper West Side in 2023. Photo by Ryan Gold via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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