Prospects for a new multi-screen movie theater in Riverhead — something the Riverhead Town Board has courted and issued several approvals for since the early 1990s — are “looking good,” according to Supervisor Sean Walter.
Walter said the owner of the large shopping center east of Ostrander Avenue has met with town officials about plans for three new free-standing buildings at the site — a 10- or 12-screen movie theater and two restaurant pads.
The plans call for the demolition of the now-vacant former Walmart store and the stores to its east, to make way for the new movie theater, Walter said. The tenants in those shops would be relocated to spaces in the rest of the shopping center, an L-shaped plaza that currently houses a Gala Fresh Farms supermarket, a liquor store, pizza and Chinese restaurants and other retail shops.
The supervisor said representatives of site owner, Riverhead PGC LLC, have met with him as well as Riverhead planning department staff to review and discuss a site plan design drawn up by the owner’s architects and engineers.
Last April, an executive at Philips International, the Manhattan-based holding company that controls the site, told RiverheadLOCAL he was then negotiating with “several” movie theater companies interested in coming to Riverhead.
“I believe a movie theater would be a very good use for the center and very good for the town,” Philips director of sales and leasing Andrew Aberham said in an interview on April 8. He declined to name the theater companies who were interested.
“We are looking to redevelop the whole site,” Aberham noted last year.
He could not immediately be reached for comment for this story.
Walter had been trying to convince Regal Cinemas to build a multiplex theater on Main Street, but ultimately the theater company demurred. The supervisor said at the time they told him they’d be very interested in coming to Route 58.
The town board in 2004 changed the zoning code to make the downtown district the only one in town where a movie theater is an allowed use. A majority of the board now favors allowing theaters on Route 58 again.
Before the 2004 code change, the Riverhead Town Board — beginning in 1996 — approved five different movie theater permits for locations on Route 58. The last one, a multiplex theater planned by Marquee Cinemas for the site where Costco Wholesale was eventually built, was approved in 2003. Marquee Cinemas’ plans were scuttled when one of the principals in project ran into financial and legal troubles unrelated to the Riverhead project.
“I am cautiously optimistic that ths is going to happen,” Walter said in an interview yesterday.
