Add The New York Post on Google There was a time when, instead of audience members in the Loew’s Jersey Theatre, there were only pigeons nesting in the rafters.
Now, after 40 years of neglect and at least one potential brush with a bulldozer, Jersey City’s grandest room is roaring back.
The 1929 movie palace at Journal Square reopens Nov. 13 with a Trey Anastasio Band show, followed a night later by The War on Drugs, marking the finish line on a two-year, $130 million restoration and the start of what its operators hope is a permanent second act.
“This reopening represents far more than the return of a historic building, it’s the revival of a landmark that has inspired generations,” Bruce Wheeler, general manager of Loew’s Jersey Theatre, said. “This marks the beginning of a new era for live entertainment in Jersey City and the entire metropolitan region.”
Designed by Rapp and Rapp, the Chicago firm behind hundreds of American movie houses, the Loew’s Jersey opened its doors on Sept. 28, 1929, just weeks before the stock market cratered.
It was built as one of five so-called “Wonder Theatres” that Loew’s Corporation scattered across the New York area — including the United Palace in Washington Heights — and the only one of the five constructed outside the five boroughs.
Architect George Rapp reportedly described the philosophy behind the gilded, over-the-top palaces this way: “opulence unbound, but opulence with a purpose.”
The idea was to make a factory worker feel like a duke for the price of a movie ticket. A three-story lobby rotunda, a Baroque Rococo facade dripping in terra cotta and a 3,021-seat Italian Renaissance-style auditorium made good on that promise, and the venue went on to host acts ranging from Duke Ellington to The Four Seasons.
But the postwar suburban exodus and the rise of the multiplex hollowed the place out. It was chopped into a triplex in 1974, went dark in 1986 and spent years staring down a wrecking ball, That was all before Jersey City bought the building and a nonprofit called Friends of the Loew’s launched a volunteer-driven rescue.
Even that effort could only do so much heavy lifting, and the theater limped along for decades on borrowed time.
“There were some spot usages of the theater 10, 12, 15 years ago. Some music videos were shot, some concerts and book signings were done,” Wheeler told The Post, adding that for the most part the last 40 years amounted to an empty, abandoned building.
The turnaround came in 2023 when Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment stepped in, teaming with the city, the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency, and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority to fund and execute a full-scale rebuild. Asked why now, after decades of false starts, Wheeler kept it simple.
“It’s … that the city really felt that making an investment and bringing this building back, again, to a state-of-the-art facility was a way to anchor the Journal Square neighborhood,” Wheeler said.
“And just as Jersey City and others have made investment and reinvestment in other areas of the city, it seemed like it was the time for Journal Square. And the mayor’s office and pretty much all the government entities are very excited about the theater coming back online.”
None of it came easy. Renovating a 97-year-old building meant confronting problems that no blueprint could predict.
Wheeler said, “When the general contractor first went in, there were things that went smoothly and according to plan. There were also likely some areas where they had to take a step back and rethink. But at the end of the day, it all seems like it’s in a great lane now, and we’re getting ourselves prepared to open up in November.”
Sean Saadeh, who’s overseeing booking strategy for the venue, said the reaction to Monday’s lineup announcement has already exceeded expectations, even with tickets not yet on sale.
“The response have been really, really positive,” Saadeh told The Post. “People are super excited about the property because it’s such a beautiful theater and it’s in an incredibly important spot in Jersey City, so a lot of people that have had history with the theater are super excited to see it really come back to life in its full use.”
The restoration team chased period accuracy down to the paint chip.
“The restoration is down to matching the colors, the original colors and the original flow of the theater,” Wheeler said. “There’s really not that many properties out there that we can point to that will not only bring in that more classic feel, but really be state-of-the-art with respect to its audio and lighting, and really the patron and the fan experience really is going to be second to none when you combine those two elements together.”
The venue was also engineered for flexibility that few historic theaters can match. Fully seated, capacity tops out around 2,700, but pulling the orchestra-level seats opens the room up to 4,000, giving promoters room to scale a show up or down depending on the act.
“That’s something that is a bit of a rarity in the market and gives artists and agents and managers the flexibility to be able to scale their show accordingly,” Wheeler said.
Location doesn’t hurt either. The theater sits directly across from the Journal Square PATH station, putting Midtown and the World Trade Center each roughly 10 to 20 minutes away.
Tickets to the opening weekend shows go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. via Ticketmaster and LoewsJersey.com, alongside a lineup that also includes Jodeci, Derek Hough, Jeff Dunham, and a World of Warcraft concert next May.
