Curtain call: A final farewell to the San Marco Theatre

Curtain call: A final farewell to the San Marco Theatre
The historic San Marco Theatre after more than 80 years of business.

The San Marco Theatre — a nationally-recognized theater and community icon — permanently closed its doors on Jan. 1.

The announcement was made on the theater’s Facebook page on Dec. 28 in a series of posts sharing the reasons behind the difficult decision to close, citing a national decline in theater attendance following COVID-19 as well as changes in the movie industry itself as it shifted many movie releases to streaming services rather than box offices.

“It’s with sad and heavy hearts that we share this news with our San Marco community and the city of Jacksonville,” the post continued. “We all have a lot of memories of this place. We’ll miss it.”

The theater first opened in 1938, making it one of the oldest surviving theaters in Jackonsville prior to its closure. It was built by famed architect Roy Benjamin.

It saw new ownership in 2019 with Ryan and Leighton Davis, Jonathan Davis, Frank Sanchez and Andrew Oetjen.

For Ryan and Leighton, taking on the theater was more of a “passion project” than anything else. Leighton, who saw her first movie there as a toddler, said the theater has held a special place in both their lives, before and after they met.

“For us living in San Marco, I mean, majority of our date nights were spent there,” Leighton said. “That was kind of our go-to place before we even became involved. So when it came up that we could partner up with a few other people in ownership, we were just ecstatic because it is quite honestly probably our favorite place in Jacksonville.”

When COVID-19 hit, Leighton said the theater closed for roughly three months — “until the world said we could start reopening” — and when it did open its doors once more, it did so to a completely new world for the movie theater and movie making industries, particularly because, at the time, no new movies were being filmed or released.

“We had to get really creative,” Leighton said.

Their out-of-the-box thinking included screening “throw-back” movies or offering princess meet-and-greets for family or Disney movies. Despite their efforts, though, it became clear that sustaining the theater was a non-viable option as their theater attendance tracked fairly evenly with the national 35% attendance decrease following COVID-19, Ryan said.

“It was a business that we got into because we were excited about it, not because it was super profitable,” he added. “Just being a thin business to begin with, we just couldn’t afford that sort of loss of attendance. Despite what we did, we never really got people to come back like the business needed them to.”

Though they are devastated that the theater’s closure happened “under our watch,” Ryan and Leighton are walking away from the theater with a lifetime of memories tied to the silver screens of the San Marco Theatre.

Leighton fondly recalled a sidewalk party for the 2019 release of the live-action “Aladdin” featuring Will Smith, where they invited Princess Jasmine to come take photos with the children.

“It was right before my grandmother passed away and she came up and just saw there and watched all the kids getting their pictures taken with Jasmine and she grew up going to that theatre,” she said. “It was just like this crazy full-circle moment.”

While Ryan and Leighton were co-owners, along with their partners, of the movie theatre, they did not own the building itself and said they are not privy to any plans for the building moving forward.

TSG Realty, LLC is the current property owner. San Marco Theatre is included in a block of properties from 1990 to 1996 San Marco Boulevard.

Pamela Howard, property manager and agent for owner with TSG Realty wrote in an e-mail that TSG Realty is already in conversations with “some great tenants.”

While the business housed in the iconic Art Deco building will soon be different, the exterior of the building is expected to remain the same.

“We treasure the architectural look of this building and we are totally committed to forever preserving the façade/marquee,” Howard added. “Several desirable neighborhoods like Winter Park, South Beach, River Oaks, and Ann Arbor have been able to repurpose closed small theater buildings with quality users while maintaining the original iconic look. That is what we will be doing here.”

By Michele Leivas
Resident Community News

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