Underground Cinema 16

Underground Cinema 16 was a 16-millimeter film theater at 2021 Sansom Street in Center City, Philadelphia, opened in mid-October 1969 by R.C. Horsch, then known as Raymond Hoersch, a 26-year-old filmmaker. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it "Philadelphia's first commercial venture into noncommercial underground theater."¹

1969

The theater occupied premises where the Pocket Playhouse had once "packed them in." Horsch tore out the stage, installed plush blue seats taken from a small preview theater in the city, remodeled the lobby, hung white-framed photographs of his own, and built a projection booth. It opened with an underground double bill, Lenny Bruce and Relativity, and Horsch said he would draw its films from the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York City and had started the theater in part to finance an 80,000-dollar feature of his own.¹

On Wednesday, October 29, 1969, Leo Goldstein, deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, posted the theater as closed for lack of the required licenses, and police were instructed to keep it empty. Horsch described his failure to obtain the papers as a "simple confusion" over the city's requirements and said the officials at City Hall were "bureaucratic, but helpful." A preview of the Vietnam War documentary In the Year of the Pig had been scheduled for that night. Horsch said the city would inspect the building the next day; Goldstein said the process could take two weeks.¹ Horsch later said that he ran the theater on Sansom Street as the Roxy.²