A lot of American cities had them, that is, before home TVs came online: Italianate, French Baroque, and Rococo people’s palaces where stars like Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, the Supremes, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, and Frank Sinatra required to the stage in theaters with interiors so luxurious they ‘d make a Tsar blush.
Loews Theater opened in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1929 and was designed by Rapp & Rapp Architects, the exact same company that finished Brooklyn Paramount in 1928 (just recently renovated by Arcadis). For Loews, Rapp & Rapp envisioned a lively Baroque-Rococo outside and an Italian Renaissance-inspired auditorium.
In 1986, Loews Theater closed its doors, thus many other “film palaces,” and was almost destroyed to make way for an office tower, but fortunately Jersey City purchased the structure in 1993. OTJ Architects was commissioned in 2021 to bring the vaunted theater back to life, as part of a $130 million repair project.
Loews lies in proximity to the Journal Square Course Station.(Courtesy OTJ Designers) The theater will have capability for 2,600 seated gusts, and 4,000 standing visitors.(Courtesy OTJ Designers)OTJ shared the first cache of makings today, showing what Loews Theater will look like when it resumes. The firm has made sure to restore the grand chandelier, a 15-foot Czech crystal focal point that’s nearly a century old. Off the Record Collective( OTC), an experiential design and production studio led by Kerri Silvestri
, is steering the interior decoration element of the major renovation project backed by the Jersey City Redevelopment Company, State of New Jersey/NJEDA, and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment.