Walk the Hudson-side path through Riverside Park on a September evening and you pass two of the Upper West Side's most recognizable dead zones. At 79th Street, the boat basin sits empty behind chain-link, its docks unused since 2021. Twenty blocks north at Broadway and 99th, the pink terra-cotta facade of the old Metro Theater still catches the late light, though nothing has screened behind it since 2005. Most residents have learned to walk past both without asking what's actually happening. That's the wrong instinct. Something is happening at both, and it's landing on the same year.
Two very different institutions, closed for two very different reasons, are now quietly converging on 2028 as the year they come back.
The Year That Keeps Coming Up
The 79th Street Boat Basin, the only marina in New York City that allows year-round houseboat residency, has been closed for reconstruction since 2021, and the NYC Parks page for the marina states plainly that it "is anticipated to reopen in 2028." About a mile north on Broadway, the nonprofit behind the old Metro Theater, now rebranded the Uptown Film Center, is targeting the same window, with its own capital campaign page setting a goal of opening "hopefully by October 2028."
Neither group is coordinating with the other. There's no shared press office, no joint groundbreaking planned. The overlap is closer to coincidence than strategy, but it's a useful coincidence, because it tells you something about how this neighborhood actually restores the things it loses. Not through a single developer with a five-year plan. Through public infrastructure money moving at public infrastructure speed, and through donor campaigns moving at donor campaign speed, both landing in the same stretch of years almost by accident.
What Actually Happened to the Boat Basin
The basin's story starts with Hurricane Sandy. The storm damaged the marina's dock framework and its original boathouse in 2012, and while some repairs followed, a subsequent inspection found the wooden dock structure and concrete foundation too deteriorated to keep operating safely. Every vessel was ordered out by November 2021.
Before that closure, the marina had already been shrinking for a different reason. At its peak, the basin was home to more than 100 boats. After the city stopped issuing new permits for houseboat residency in 2010, occupancy dropped to roughly 10 of the marina's 116 slips still lived on year-round by the time it shut down for good. That's the kind of number worth sitting with: a marina built to hold well over a hundred vessels, down to ten liveaboards, closed anyway because the docks themselves were failing underneath what was left.
The waitlist tells the opposite story. Demand for a slip never went away. Reporting on the project puts the current waiting list at roughly 1,000 names, with wait times stretching up to 15 years.
What's coming back isn't a repair job so much as a rebuild. The city's Public Design Commission approved a new dockhouse designed by Architecture Research Office: a one-story structure elevated on nine columns above the water, with chamfered corners for better sightlines and a stainless steel facade that reflects the river and sky, built to meet current FEMA flood-zone standards. The footprint is smaller than the original, about 3,800 square feet, but the project also includes dredging the basin for the first time in decades and reconfiguring the docks themselves. The whole effort runs close to $90 million, funded through city capital dollars and FEMA disaster recovery money, which is the normal path for post-Sandy waterfront infrastructure in this city. It just isn't a fast one.
A few names that have been attached to the basin over the decades give some sense of what's being brought back:
- Mad Magazine writer Dick DeBartolo, who used a boat there as his office
- Novelist Mario Puzo, who moored at the basin
- Frank Sinatra, another longtime boat owner at the marina
- Roy Cohn, who docked a 95-foot yacht there in the 1960s
- Film crews for both 9½ Weeks and You've Got Mail, which shot scenes at the marina and aboard boats moored there
None of that comes back automatically in 2028. What comes back is the dock capacity to let people try.
Twenty-One Years Dark on Broadway
The Metro Theater's closure has nothing to do with a storm. It's a slower kind of failure, the kind that happens when a building simply outlives its business model and nobody fixes it in time.
The theater opened in 1933 under the name Midtown, took the name Metro in 1982, ran as an adult movie house through the 1970s before flipping to arthouse programming in the 1980s, and then closed in 2005. Its interior was demolished the following year. For roughly two decades after that, the building sat as exactly what generations of Upper West Siders learned to expect from it: a familiar, faded facade with nothing behind it.
That changed in April 2025, when the nonprofit Upper West Side Cinema Center bought the building for just under $7 million, backed by a $3.5 million grant from Governor Kathy Hochul, $500,000 from the state senate, support from the Hearthland Foundation, the Martell-Klingenstein Foundation, the Brandt Jackson Foundation, and more than 500 individual community donors. That October, the group renamed the project Uptown Film Center and released the plan: five screens inside the old shell, the largest holding around 185 seats, a second at 150, and three smaller rooms seating about 45 apiece, plus a street-level cafe and a lobby with a high curved ceiling and terrazzo flooring. The landmarked terra-cotta facade stays. The organization set a $29 million capital campaign to get there, hopes to break ground in early 2027, and is targeting an opening by October 2028, which would make it the only full-time nonprofit arthouse cinema north of Lincoln Center, filling a gap that's existed since Lincoln Plaza Cinemas closed in 2018.
The Preview Season
Here's where the two stories touch, even without either institution planning it that way. While the Uptown Film Center raises money and waits on permits, it isn't sitting still. This summer the group ran a pop-up series called Tales of Summer, screening films across the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and Harlem from June 3 through September 18, including Moonrise Kingdom, Footloose, and Summer of Soul, with three of the season's titles, Summer of Soul, Mamma Mia!, and In the Heights, shown free and outdoors.
The last of those, In the Heights, screens on September 18 as part of Riverside Park Conservancy's Summer on the Hudson season, near the Red Clay Tennis Courts. It's the same conservancy and city parks partnership that has run more than 400 free events along the west side waterfront this year, now in its 24th season. The Uptown Film Center calls the partnership a first for its pop-up series and a chance to show the neighborhood, ahead of any groundbreaking, what its permanent programming is meant to feel like.
So while the boat basin waits behind fencing for dredge permits and dock contracts, the theater that has no building yet is already putting a screen up in the same park system, on the same public calendar, for the same neighborhood. That's not a coincidence of geography. It's what a long rebuild looks like from the inside: you keep showing up in public before the ribbon-cutting, because the wait is real and the goodwill has to survive it.
The Pattern Underneath Both Projects
Neither the marina nor the theater is being restored by a private developer racing a five-year return. One is federal disaster recovery money moving through city procurement. The other is a donor-funded nonprofit raising money one foundation gift and one individual check at a time. Different funding models, different failure modes, same rough timeline.
That's worth knowing if you live here, because it recalibrates expectations. The boat basin and the Uptown Film Center are not going to reopen next spring, or the spring after. They are going to stay visibly under construction for at least two more years, and the neighborhood's job in the meantime is the same for both: keep showing up to what's already running, whether that's a free outdoor screening in Riverside Park or simply a walk past two facades that are, for once, actually moving toward something.
What's Worth Doing Before October
- Catch the free outdoor screening of In the Heights on September 18 as part of Summer on the Hudson, presented with the Uptown Film Center
- If you've ever wondered about the boat basin waitlist, the inquiries for the waiting list go through the marina's own contact channel listed on the NYC Parks marina page, not a broker
- Watch for the Uptown Film Center's next pop-up announcement, since the group has said the series is meant to preview what permanent programming will look like once the doors open
Both projects are a reminder that the Upper West Side's oldest landmarks don't disappear quietly. They just take longer to come back than anyone would like, and they come back through the unglamorous work of federal grants, capital campaigns, and neighbors who keep showing up in the meantime.
If you're the kind of Upper West Sider who tracks these things and eventually wants a second set of eyes on what a building, a block, or a listing is really worth, Jed Lewin Real Estate is a quiet, no-pressure place to start that conversation whenever the time comes.
