I recently came across this picture on Twitter of Mumbai’s Eros movie theatre covered with tarpaulins as it gets ready to be torn down to make way for yet another ritzy shopping mall. Built in 1938, Eros is one of the prime example of art deco style of architecture in the city, which was very popular in the 1920s and 30s across the world.
Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials, while symmetry was its hallmark. However, its dominance ended with the beginning of World War II and the rise of the strictly functional styles of modern architecture.
South Mumbai became a Mecca of art deco in the 1930s with apartments on the newly reclaimed Marine Drive built in this fashion. The trend later spread to suburbs such as Matunga and Chembur. In fact, even today Mumbai houses the second highest number of art deco buildings in the world after Miami.
Coming back to Eros, during my stay in Bombay (as it was known back then in the early 1990s), it was a landmark theatre located right opposite to the Churchgate station. It was dull yellow structure with a light maroon façade and had two art deco blocks joining in the middle to cylindrical structure.
Eros along with Regal and Sterling used to screen only English movies, and I remember that Steve Martin starrer Father of the Bride was the first movie I saw at Eros, and the first in Mumbai. The movie was a hit and the producers tried to milk it further with sequels.
After that these three movie theatres – Eros, Regal and Sterling became permanent fixtures during off days and holidays.
Those were pre-internet days and movie watching was an altogether different experience. Online booking was not even thought of, and hence, one had to reach the theatre a couple of hours in advance to avoid facing a ‘house full’ board at the ticket counter. Making an advance booking meant going to the theatre in the morning to book for a night show.
After the culture of people going to malls and watching movies in multiplexes became well entrenched, the single-screen legacy theatres came under threat. Sterling reinvented itself into a multiplex, Regal diluted its Hollywood only norm and Eros stopped screening movies in 2016.
Now this piece of priceless heritage is soon going to be history.
