Exclusive | Jersey City Loews Wonder Theater to reopen following a $130M renovation and decades of neglect

There was a time when, instead of audience members in the Loew’s Jersey Theatre, there were only pigeons nesting in the rafters.Now, after 40 years of neglect and at least one potential brush with a bulldozer, Jersey City’s grandest room is roaring back. The 1929 movie palace at Journal Square reopens Nov.13 with a Trey Anastasio Band show, followed a night later by The War on Drugs, marking the finish line on a two-year, $130 million restoration and the start of what its operators hope is a permanent second act.“This reopening represents far more than the return of a historic building, it’s the revival of a landmark that has inspired generations,” Bruce Wheeler, general manager of Loew’s Jersey Theatre, said.

“This marks the beginning of a new era for live entertainment in Jersey City and the entire metropolitan region.”The building has earned the reputation.Designed by Rapp and Rapp, the Chicago firm behind hundreds of American movie houses, the Loew’s Jersey opened its doors on Sept.

28, 1929, just weeks before the stock market cratered. It was built as one of five so-called “Wonder Theatres” that Loew’s Corporation scattered across the New York area — including the United Palace in Washington Heights — and the only one of the five constructed outside the five boroughs. Architect George Rapp reportedly described the philosophy behind the gilded, over-the-top palaces this way: “opulence unbound, but opulence with a purpose.” The idea was to make a factory worker feel like a duke for the price of a movie ticket.A three-story lobby rotunda, a Baroque Rococo facade dripping in terra cotta and a 3,021-seat Italian Renaissance-style auditorium made good on that promise, and the venue went on to host acts ranging from Duke Ellington to The Four Seasons.But the postwar suburban exodus and the rise of the multiplex hollowed the place out.

It was chopped into a triplex in 1974, went dark in 1986 and spent years staring down a wrecking...