Former Amato Opera House on the Bowery Gains Both Luxury Living and New Fire Escapes

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The former Amato Opera House is now unrecognizable as its former self. With scaffolding dismantled – and lettering gone from the facade – the theater is reincarnated as luxury living.

There are some visible additions to the 1899-era tenement, including fresh white paintjob, the new duplex penthouse, and external fire escape system currently undergoing installation.

As previously reported, owner (and hated landlord) Steve Croman is converting 319 Bowery into a mixed-use dwelling befitting Bowery 2.0. Three glitzy, full-floor apartments, including the aforementioned penthouse will sit atop the ground level store. The retail space was last on the market in 2014, asking a whopping $35,000 per month in rent.  A tipster at the time had informed us that the last few interested parties were scared away more from its haunted nature than the rent itself.

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Amato Opera’s swan song was on May 31, 2009. Company founder Anthony Amato sold to Steve Croman four months earlier, capping four decades on the Bowery. Amato himself died two years later in December 2011.

Steve Croman, meanwhile, faces twenty-five years in prison for twenty felonies including grand larceny, falsifying business records, tax fraud, conspiring to defraud, and offering a false instrument.