'Bleeding Money' Southampton Cinema Owner Keeps Looking To Sell

Ken Karlin, owner of the Hill Street building once home to the Southampton movie theater, says he hasn’t been paid rent in a year. The COVID-19 pandemic hit cinemas across the country hard, prompting wholesale closures in the ailing industry. In the spring of 2020, the Regal movie chain shut down all 536 of its movie theaters, including the one in Southampton and the one in East Hampton. The theater in Hampton Bays had closed earlier, before the coronavirus crisis, and may be turned into a CVS drug store.

The Southampton theater owner, a North Fork resident, said his family has owned the site for 40 years and it’s been for sale “for some time,” with an asking price of $8.9 million. “I’m bleeding money,” he said, adding, “it’s time to move on.”

Though the property has been up for sale for a while, community curiosity was piqued when, during the last several weeks, fresh “for sale” signs appeared on the building’s doors.

Mr. Karlin said he’d been in contract to sell the building “many times,” but the contracts fall through in the face of village bureaucracy. He stopped short of elucidating the nature of the governmental impediments to successful sales, but was emphatic that his building’s zoning means “I can put anything in there.” He said officials are adamant about having a movie theater at the site. His response? “Then you buy it and operate it.”

Village Board member Mark Parash wandered the rooms of that theater in his youth growing up in the village. “I grew up going in and out of all those rooms,” he recalled. A movie theater is one of the primary assets a vibrant village or hamlet has, the lawmaker pointed out. “I’d love to see someone come in with a vision,” he said, offering his “dream” of a performing arts center similar to Bay Street in Sag Harbor or the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center being established in Southampton. That type of a destination use is “a huge draw,” Mr. Parash observed.

At this point, Mr. Karlin said, it doesn’t matter to him whether the buyer chooses to use the building for a theater or not. “I don’t really care who does what with it, not my concern anymore. Pay me my money, I walk away, it’s all yours. Have fun.”

He acknowledged some companies are trying to find ways to draw people into theaters, with food and alcohol a potential. “God bless them, do whatever you want. Just not on my dime.”

According to the website Cinema Treasures, the Colonial-style movie house was opened by Glynn Theatres in 1932 as the 1,000-seat Southampton Theatre. It was operated by Prudential Circuit in the 1940s. It was split into a fourplex in the 1990s and operated by United Artists, then as a Regal UA cinema more recently.

Regal reopened some of the theaters that had been closed due to COVID-19 at the end of the summer, only to close them again in October, citing the lack of business.