Maplewood Residents Fear Downtown Redevelopment Endangers Historic Theater

Maplewood’s town government has been drafting a plan to redevelop its historic downtown since last year. But the effort has proven controversial with some residents who fear it endangers an important landmark — Maplewood Theater.

When Mayor Nancy Adams announced at a community meeting in September that a proposed deal with Maplewood Redevelopment LLC to buy the township’s historic movie theater had fallen through, the crowd in attendance erupted in applause.

“I didn’t know that would be an applause line,” Adams said.

Like so many small-town movie houses, Maplewood Theater, built in 1927,  closed during the pandemic. The current owner, Anthony Loffredo, a local businessman, was in negotiations with Maplewood Redevelopment LLC — which lists Mark Slade as its registered agent — to buy the buildings. But the company pulled out of the deal.

Those who oppose the redevelopment plan won a small victory — language was included to protect the theater from being demolished. But it still allows the building to be torn down if an engineering study deems it “structurally unstable.” There is also no stipulation that the use of the theater must remain. Some fear this could spell doom to this storied institution.

Adams told Preservation New Jersey that the plan was drafted at a time when there was uncertainty about the future of downtown. But she believes adding language restricting the use of the Maplewood Theater to a performance space might scare off potential developers at a time when the movie theater industry is struggling. “As someone who works in downtown revitalization, I don’t want a single use to be required, because it’s too difficult to get anything done then,” Adams said. “I think we have opportunities to get improvements done at other entertainment areas in town.”

However, Angela Matusik, cofounder of the Maplewood Film Society, believes that local nonprofit-run theaters are becoming increasingly common throughout the state and could be just the antidote to save her local movie house. This is what happened in the case of the Claridge and Bellevue Theater, both managed by Montclair Film.

Matusik and fellow members of the Maplewood Film Society wore red kerchiefs around their necks on the night of the September meeting as a united symbol of protest and marched from the theater to the Woodlands where the meeting was held.

After a presentation from planner Paul Grygiel, whose Hoboken-based firm authored the redevelopment plan, Matusik read from the Bellevue Theater’s redevelopment plan as if it were a manifesto. That plan included a provision that the Upper Montclair theater had to remain.

“We’ve been talking to planners and developers who have told us that there is much more of a story to be told in revitalizing something than tearing something down,” Matusik said. “That could be Maplewood’s story.”

However, Grygiel argued that allowing a developer to build downtown could be a means of saving the theater, which he said “doesn’t happen for free.”

“The purpose of this is not just to keep the buildings you have there, but allow for new development that could fund improvements,” he said. “So we’re trying to strike that balance of allowing investment in this area. But there have been guidelines to preserve the special character, historic character — many of the things we talked about previously in the process.”

The thought of losing the theater harkens back to the demolition in 2016 of another local landmark — the historic midcentury modern post office, designed by a local architect Albert Pollitt. That property was redeveloped into a three-story, 20-unit apartment building.

“It’s like déjà vu,” said resident and architect Inda Sechzer, who moved to Maplewood in 1983.

The difference in the case of the current redevelopment plan is that it allows for an even larger development — a five-story building — that Sechzer believes is out of scale with the historic nature of the village itself.

“Maplewood is not an exit off the highway — it’s a tiny, four-block village that you can only access by winding through residential streets,” Sechzer said. “You can’t impose all of this on a tiny little village.

One by one, residents at the September meeting shared memories of the Maplewood Theater and how important it was to preserve. Elizabeth Moglia Jackson said that the theater was one of the reasons she moved to town 11 years ago. “We decided this was a place we wanted to raise our family,” Jackson said. “By saving the town’s theater space, you’ll be helping to save the soul of the small towns in the nation — it would be a wonderful example.”

Darren Tobia is the editor of the Four Oranges, which covers the arts and historic preservation in Essex County.