A Jersey shore art deco movie theater has roared back to life in an unlikely saga
It is a lucky town that recaptures an old movie theater left to crumble. In Ventnor, a Jersey shore town just below Atlantic City, they’ve now done it twice.
In its latest incarnation, the beloved 1938 art deco Ventnor theater has been meticulously and expensively restored, renovated, literally shored up with steel beams, patiently tended to during a long coronavirus lockdown, and remarkably, reborn just in time for New Jersey’s reopening, not to mention the summer season.
Unlike the last time, when John Berezowski, a quirky former theater sweeper saved the theater, curated art films, and personally handed out mints and coffee in a theater that still had its red velvet balcony restrooms, this nearly $4 million rebirth comes with state-of-the-art projection, three theaters, a restaurant, and newly liquor-licensed bars on two floors. The balconies in the new Ventnor Square Theatre have been outfitted with a bar counter and swivel seats that can be rented out for private events.
Nucky’s, the new restaurant and bar that consumes parts of both floors, has expansive front windows that swing out wide onto Ventnor Avenue, adding an incongruously metropolitan feel to a block dominated by Wawa and Sack O’Subs. The transformation has Ventnor’s elected officials enthusing like they’re writing the latest treatment for the big screen.
They can’t believe how this plot turned out. It’s amazing the thing didn’t get torn down, a twist in a town where historic homes seem to be torn down every day, and real estate is at a premium.
“It’s a fairy-tale ending to a narrative,” said Tim Kriebel, a city commissioner who took his future wife to a movie at the old Ventnor Twin when he was 15. He says he knew she was the one when he agreed to forgo “Swamp Thing” to see her choice, “Chariots of Fire.”
“A city falls in love with the theater in its main downtown,” he said. “City loses theater. City gets new theater back. That narrative is hard to resist.” He had been worried that Ventnor, a town wedged on Absecon Island between Atlantic City and Margate, was becoming a “drivethrough city.”
Now, he says, it will become a destination.