Poster That Survived Fire Returned to Sag Harbor Cinema

On a recent trip to the basement of the Sag Harbor Village Police headquarters, Chief Austin J. McGuire came upon a movie poster enclosed in a glass display case, known as a vitrine, in a storage room. It turns out, the poster was for “Harry and Snowman,” the last film screened at the Sag Harbor Cinema — just before a fire swept through the building on December 16, 2016.

“When they took the sign down that night, they gave it to police for safekeeping,” McGuire said. “Nobody ever claimed it.”

He carted the poster and its display case over to the cinema, which reopened nearly five years after the fire, where he presented it to April Gornik, the chair emeritus of the cinema’s board of directors and a leader of the effort to preserve the old movie house.

Gornik cracked open the case and said it retained a slight odor of smoke from the fire that caused extensive damage to the theater and neighboring buildings before being put out, in frigid conditions, by the Sag Harbor Fire Department and 18 other departments from across the East End.

An effort had begun to buy the building from former owner Gerald Mallow the summer before the fire. The deal was finally closed in April 2017. After fundraising, design work, and delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the theater reopened to the public in April 2021.

“It’s appropriate that it’s back at the cinema,” Gornik said of the display case. She said the staff would discuss how the salvaged keepsake would be displayed in a lobby full of old posters from previous screenings over the decades.

“Harry and Snowman” is a documentary by director Ron Davis about a Dutch immigrant, Harry deLeyer, who rescued an old plow horse from the slaughterhouse and went on to transform it into a champion show jumper.