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[caption id="attachment_48077" align="alignnone" width="800"] The facade of the Sag Harbor Cinema on Main Street on Friday ,February 5. Michael Heller photos.[/caption]
By Douglas Feiden
Gerald Mallow recalls a day in 1978 when his wife Francoise told a patron at the American Hotel that he had recently purchased the Sag Harbor Cinema. “You poor woman,” came the reply. “Your husband must have escaped from a mental institution.”
[caption id="attachment_48075" align="alignleft" width="300"]
The interior of the Sag Harbor Cinema.[/caption]
Now, after 38 years of ownership, the occasional controversy and an unmatched if often quirky cinematic repertoire, Mr. Mallow is ready for the next reel. He’s placed the single-screen, art-house theater on the block, listing it with Saunders & Associates at a sky-high asking price: $14 million.
Why is he selling his dream factory? “It’s a bright and sunny winter day, and I think it is time to give someone else a chance to run the theater," he said. "I've had my vision for a long time, and I think it’s time to let someone new pursue their own vision.”
That vision for the historic 400-seat theater won’t come cheap. The 7,000-square-foot property, which includes a two-story art studio and occupies a 0.16-acre lot at 90 Main Street, is being offered at $2,000 per square foot, a precipitous price tag for a Sag Harbor commercial building.
“I’ve already had a lot of interest from possible Chinese and Europeans buyers,” Mr. Mallow says.
Between 10 and 15 “genuine lookers” have inquired about the building, including three to five development teams that have already been on site “multiple times,” said Ed Bruehl, the Saunders broker who has the exclusive listing.
“Mr. or Mrs. Big might not have come in for a look yet,” he said, referring generically to a kind of deep-pocketed developer who could potentially lock up a mega-deal. “But their teams have been in – the architect, the builder, the accountant, the manager — to walk the property and do the math.”
Mr. Bruehl says he’s met with two very different kinds of would-be developers: “One group loves the theater, wants it to remain exactly as it is and asks what can be done to regenerate it as a 2016 theater,” he says.
Other developers would prefer to reinvent the property. “They don’t care so much about what’s in there now, like the quality of the sound system or the carpet. They’d take it and rebuild the whole thing,” he adds.
One thing would remain in perpetuity, the shimmering, 18-foot-long sign that trumpets the words ‘SAG HARBOR” in red and blue neon. It’s a village historic landmark and must remain mounted on the building’s face.
Mr. Mallow ran afoul of local preservationists in 2004 when he stripped the sheet-metal letters off the façade. Funded by residents, an exact aluminum replica of the rusted-out original relit Main Street in 2005. It is legally required to remain.
But other features of the two-story, steel-and-concrete theater with white stucco walls can be altered, at least theoretically, under existing zoning. The lot sits in the Village Business Zoning District, or VB Zone, which permits a maximum of three stories, one floor more than now exists.
Mr. Bruehl says it can be redeveloped at 21,000 square feet, or three times current size. A future owner could maintain a first-floor theater and add a restaurant or retail, using the second-floor for retail and office space and a third-floor for “three sunset-view apartments,” he said.
Those potential plans would need approvals from multiple boards before they could come to fruition, said Tom Preiato, the village’s building inspector, who called them a “wish list.”
Mr. Preiato confirmed that three stories are permitted in the VB Zone; that a theater, retail and restaurant are permitted first-floor uses; that retail and office uses are allowed on the second-floor, and that accessory apartments are legal third-floor uses.
“It’s a perfect theater,” Mr. Mallow says. “I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘Don't change a thing.’ I think it’s fine exactly the way it is. But other people don’t think it’s so fine, and those people have the right to make the changes.”
Cinema-lovers are already holding their breath. Built in 1936 on the footprint of at least three other movie houses, the earliest dating to 1915, the theater has an eye-catching façade and has drawn such patrons as Billy Joel, Terence Stamp, E.L. Doctorow, Christie Brinkley and Lauren Bacall.
“Oh, my God, it’s kind of like the small independent bookstore of cinema,” said landscape artist April Gornik. “It’s great to have Netflix, but it’s not quite the same experience.
“For real movie buffs, it’s a sacred trust, a place where you can find something that doesn’t have as its principal goal making money…that is not self-adulatory and not moronic.”
Arguably, Mr. Mallow will miss it the most. “Whenever I walk down a dark theater on a dark night, I still get a chill up my spine thinking that Frankenstein, or at least Bela Lugosi, is coming after me,” he said.
