On November 9, a small nonprofit called Friends of the Cerrito Theater is throwing a party inside the Art Deco movie house on San Pablo Avenue. The flyer calls it a 20th anniversary. Technically, that's true: the theater reopened to the public on November 1, 2006, after a community fight to keep it from being gutted into a furniture showroom. Twenty years from that date lands you right around the party.
What the flyer doesn't say, because it doesn't need to for the people throwing it, is that the 2006 reopening lasted less than three years before the theater went dark again. The operator that actually runs the place today, and has run it since the summer of 2009, gets folded into the same 20-year count even though its own tenure only stretches back seventeen. If you live in El Cerrito and you've caught a movie there in the last decade, you've been watching films inside a building that had to be rescued twice, sold once, and legally locked into place before it stood a chance of lasting this long.
Christmas Day, 1937
The theater opened on Christmas Day 1937 with a showing of Thin Ice, seating 644 people in a single grand auditorium. For roughly a quarter century it ran as a movie house should. Then, in the early 1960s, Kiefer's Furniture bought the building and converted it into a warehouse. The screen came out. The seats came out. For close to forty years, the space that once held a Christmas Day movie crowd held sofas and dining sets.
Kiefer's went out of business in 2001 and put the building up for sale. The new owner had a plan that made sense from a real estate standpoint and almost none from a preservation one: renovate the block, and dispose of what was left of the theater's original Art Deco interior, which had somehow survived four decades as storage space.
The Building Almost Became Something Else
That plan is what turned a warehouse sale into a community fight. Neighbors formed Friends of the Cerrito Theater specifically to keep the interior intact. The City of El Cerrito took out a three-month lease on the building in 2002 to study what it would cost to bring the theater back to life. During that lease, the city held an open house.
More than 3,000 people showed up in a single day to walk through a building most of them had only known as a place to buy a couch.
That number is worth sitting with. A city-run feasibility study is normally a quiet, procedural thing. This one turned into a one-day event that drew a crowd most theaters only see for a blockbuster opening weekend, and the building on display wasn't even running as a theater yet.
A Timeline Even Longtime Residents Get Wrong
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1937 | Theater opens Christmas Day, 644 seats |
| Early 1960s | Kiefer's Furniture converts it to a warehouse |
| 2001 | Kiefer's closes; new owner plans to strip the interior |
| 2002 | City takes a 3-month lease; open house draws 3,000+ visitors |
| Nov 1, 2006 | Reopens as Cerrito Speakeasy, showing Casablanca |
| May 2009 | Closes again over profitability and a rent dispute |
| July 15, 2009 | Reopens as Rialto Cinemas Cerrito with a sold-out Harry Potter screening |
| 2018 | City sells the theater to Rialto for $790,000 under a 99-year preservation covenant |
| Nov 9, 2026 | 20th anniversary event, counted from the 2006 reopening |
Laid out this way, the gap between 2006 and 2009 is easy to miss if you weren't paying attention at the time, and easy to forget if you were.
Twenty Years, With a Three-Year Hole in the Middle
The 2006 reopening was real. The city's Redevelopment District worked with Friends of the Cerrito Theater to bring the building back, and it relaunched under Speakeasy Theaters with a screening of Casablanca, a nice bit of symbolism for a building that had just been rescued from becoming something else entirely.
It didn't hold. By May 2009, the theater closed again, done in by a lack of profitability. What followed was not a quiet handoff. Speakeasy's owners attempted to claim ownership of the improvements they'd made to the building and threatened to sue the city for several million dollars. The city viewed the claim as meritless and threatened to countersue over unpaid rent and loan repayments. Somewhere in that standoff, the theater sat empty again, less than three years after 3,000 people had lined up to save it the first time.
The Second Save Nobody Throws a Party For
The city picked Rialto Cinemas as the new operator, and the theater reopened on July 15, 2009, to a sold-out crowd for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That was seventeen years ago this past summer.
Here's the part that gets lost in the November 9 framing: Rialto Cinemas has now run this theater for longer, uninterrupted, than the 2006 Speakeasy era lasted before it collapsed. But because the anniversary clock started at the 2006 reopening rather than the 2009 one, the milestone gets attached to the version of the theater that didn't make it, not the one that has spent nearly two decades actually keeping the lights on.
That's not a criticism of the nonprofit hosting the party. It's a reasonable way to count from a community's perspective. The building came back to life once, in 2006, and everything since has been a continuation of that decision, even through a rocky patch. But if you're the kind of person who likes knowing what a milestone is actually measuring, it's worth knowing that the "20 years" on the banner isn't 20 years of one thing working. It's 20 years since the town decided the building was worth saving, a decision it ended up having to make again just three years later.
What Actually Protects It Now
For a long stretch, the thing standing between the Cerrito Theater and another closure was community goodwill and a city willing to hold the lease. That changed in 2018. Due to changes in state law, the City of El Cerrito lost the ability to continue owning the theater and sold it to Rialto for $790,000. The sale agreement required Rialto to maintain the historic elements of the building while operating it as a cinema or performance space for 99 years.
That covenant, not affection, is what keeps the murals on the walls today: dancing warriors, maidens, and harlequins, alongside a depiction of Zeus with his thunderbolts, all original to the building and all specifically protected by that 2018 agreement. The theater isn't safe because people love it, though they clearly do. It's safe because a legal document says the building has to keep functioning as a theater for most of the rest of this century.
What You'll Find If You Walk In Tonight
The physical theater looks nothing like it did in 1937, even with those murals intact. What opened as a single 644-seat auditorium is now split into two screens, a downstairs house and an upstairs one, seating a combined 278 people as of last year, less than half the original capacity spread across twice as many screens. You can order food at your seat, including pizza, sandwiches, and salads, along with beer and wine, an amenity that would have been unthinkable to the Christmas Day crowd in 1937 and is now just how the Rialto Cinemas Cerrito operates.
Friends of the Cerrito Theater is still active as a watchdog group, and still programs classic film nights that have nothing to do with the current release schedule. The November 9 event replaces one of those classic screenings, which tells you something about how the group treats its own anniversary: not as a bigger version of business as usual, but as a pause from it.
If you've walked past the marquee on San Pablo Avenue without thinking much about it, this is a good month to go in. Not because 20 years is a clean number, but because the building behind that number spent most of its life as something other than a theater, came back twice, and is only guaranteed to stay a theater because someone wrote it into a contract that runs until roughly 2117.
That kind of staying power says something about El Cerrito beyond the theater itself. It's a town that has shown, more than once, that it will put in the work to keep a piece of itself intact rather than let it quietly become a furniture store, a parking lot, or whatever the next use might have been. If you're curious about what else in this city has that same kind of staying power, or you just want to talk through what's changing block by block, Myron Potter is always glad to grab coffee and compare notes on the neighborhood.
