Jack Greenberg, in his brown Merrells, white socks, and transition glasses working overtime on an unseasonably hot Friday afternoon in October, looks the part of a movie buff. On his phone, the 25-year-old programmer has the receipts to back it up. “I have all the math,” he says, pulling up a spreadsheet of how many movies he has seen in his time as a member of the AMC Theatres rewards program. We’re sitting at a bus stop outside the Kips Bay AMC 15, where Greenberg, according to his spreadsheet, has seen 216 movies in the past three years and three months. He has spent much of his life in the neighborhood; born at the NYU Langone–owned Tisch Hospital, he now lives a few blocks from the theater. The day before, he was here to see The History of Concrete, which he describes as a “very personal documentary about seeing one’s neighborhood change.”

He is living in a similar moment. In late August, Variety confirmed rumors that this theater would close at the end of this year after 27 years of operation on Second Avenue. With box-office sales down long-term, ticket prices up, and movie theaters closing in rapid succession since COVID, the site will be taken over by one of the actually growing industries in America: health care. NYU Langone Health, which has expanded in the tristate area by 376 percent since 2007, is expanding a bit more, occupying the theater for what it has described as clinical space for patient care.

Kips Bay is not one of the most famous neighborhoods in Manhattan; it is not visited by tourists or celebrities so much as people coming from and going to one of its many hospitals. But when residents learned of the AMC’s closure, they were outraged by the encroachment of yet another medical office — and called on their elected officials to save the theater. “They’re going to keep creeping into Kips Bay, and it’s going to be just a boring place to live,” says Greenberg.

At a meeting of the local community board on September 9, the neighborhood news was not well received. Jared Ian Goldman, who executive-produced the Oscar-nominated Loving and The Devil All the Time, said the loss of the theater was an “existential cultural issue that we’re dealing with.” Others were frustrated by the lack of transparency coming from NYU Langone or the reality that so many labs and hospital systems are already in the neighborhood: Bellevue, the Margaret........

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