Metro Cinema Art Deco Landmark

At the Dhobi Talao junction, where Mahatma Gandhi Road gathers the traffic funnelling down from Marine Lines and Kalbadevi, a sandstone tower curves around the corner like the prow of a liner.

• This is Metro Cinema, opened in 1938 as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's flagship picture palace in India, and still one of the most complete Art Deco street facades in a city often said to hold the world's second-largest collection of Deco buildings after Miami.
• Even in heavy South Mumbai traffic the building announces itself: a tall vertical sign fin, long horizontal banding, and a stepped crown that catches the late afternoon light.
• The design is generally credited to Thomas W.
• Lamb, the American architect behind a string of 1920s and 1930s movie palaces, with the Bombay architect D. W.
• Ditchburn (of Ditchburn, Mistri & Bhedwar) as associate architect.
• The vocabulary is textbook Deco: a rounded corner drum, fluted pilasters running the full height of the elevation, shallow speed-lines that pull the eye around the bend, and warm red sandstone that reads almost pink at sunset.
• The original auditorium was decorated with murals reportedly painted by artists associated with the Sir J. J.
• School of Art, which gave a Hollywood-owned theatre a distinctly Bombay hand.
• Much of that interior was reworked when the single screen was subdivided into a multi-screen cinema in the mid-2000s.
• Metro stands a little apart from the famous Deco parade along Marine Drive and the western edge of Oval Maidan, so it works best as one stop on a longer architecture walk rather than a destination in itself.
• Come on foot from Churchgate or CSMT, reading the Victorian Gothic and Deco frontages as you go, and arrive here.
• It remains a working cinema rather than a preserved monument, so the ground floor is busy with queues and signage; the reward is the upper storeys, best seen from the far pavement across Mahatma Gandhi Road where the whole curve is visible at once.
• Screening hours and programming change, so check locally if you hope to go inside.
• For food, this is a rewarding corner of the city if you order carefully.
• Dhobi Talao and the lanes running north into Kalbadevi and Princess Street are lined with Gujarati and Marwari snack counters selling dhokla, khaman, fafda, misal and freshly fried farsan, and several are meat-free — but Mumbai also has a deep seafood and non-vegetarian food culture, so look for a pure-veg board and confirm at the counter before ordering.
• The Kalbadevi side has long-running Gujarati thali houses about a kilometre north, while South Indian tiffin rooms near Marine Lines and Churchgate do idli, dosa and filter coffee; at the tiffin rooms, ask whether egg preparations share the kitchen if that matters to you.
• Sugarcane juice, falooda and kulfi stalls cluster near the junction in the evening.