History

By 1929 the Loew’s cinema chain was the largest movie-theatre operator in the United States, and its founder Marcus Loew had recently died leaving a legacy of theatrical ambition. The company’s response to competition from the rival Balaban and Katz circuit in Chicago and the Publix circuit in the South was to commission five grand movie palaces—the “Wonder Theatres”—across the New York metropolitan area simultaneously. Thomas W. Lamb, who had spent two decades designing theatres across America including Madison Square Garden (1925) and the Loew’s State in Times Square (1921), was the obvious architect for the project.

The Jersey City theatre was strategically located at Journal Square, the commercial and transport hub of Hudson County. Loew’s management calculated that the square’s concentration of commuter rail lines and street-car connections would deliver audiences from across New Jersey who could not access the Manhattan theatres. The building opened on October 3, 1929, just three weeks before the Wall Street Crash that inaugurated the Great Depression. Despite the timing, the theatre prospered through the 1930s and 1940s as an affordable entertainment destination in a heavily working-class market.

The decline of the single-screen palace, multiplexing, and suburban flight eroded attendance through the 1960s and 1970s. Loew’s closed the Jersey in 1986. A preservation coalition that would eventually become Friends of Loew’s formed to prevent demolition, and after a decade of advocacy secured the building for restoration. Restoration work, funded through a combination of state grants, federal tax credits, and private donations, has addressed the lobby, auditorium plasterwork, and organ. The theatre reopened for public events in 2003 and continues to serve as a community arts venue.