Drive down East Jersey Street on a Friday night and you will hit a line of cars looking for parking that has nothing to do with anything else happening in Midtown that evening. No block party, no game at the high school, no reason a stranger would notice unless they looked up and saw the marquee lit above 1148 East Jersey Street. That marquee belongs to the Ritz Theatre, and this year it turns 100. What most people driving past do not know is that the building isn't coasting on its age. By its own owner's estimate, close to four in ten people walking through those doors on a given night drove in from somewhere other than Elizabeth.
That single detail is the reason this is worth a closer look. A hundred-year-old movie palace that survived a 1980 demolition order is not supposed to be pulling outside visitors into a Union County side street in 2026. But that is roughly what is happening, and the reason has less to do with nostalgia than with a very specific booking strategy that most of Elizabeth walks past without noticing.
A Building That Was Supposed to Become a Parking Lot
The site has been staging entertainment since 1865, when the Drake Opera House first opened there. That building went through several names, People's Theatre, Star Theatre, Jacob's Theatre, Proctor's Theatre, before it came down in the 1920s. In 1925, theater owner Jacob Fabian bought the property and hired architect Fred Wesley Wentworth to design something grander. What opened on March 9, 1926, as Fabian's Ritz, seated 2,791 people under an Art Deco ceiling built wide rather than deep, a layout that gave nearly every seat a clear line to the stage.
By 1941 the Ritz had been absorbed into the Warner Bros. circuit, and it ran as a working movie house into the 1960s. Patronage thinned through the 1970s, and RKO closed it for good on October 31, 1979, the last double feature reportedly Halloween and Coma. By 1980 the city was weighing whether to tear it down for a parking lot. A group of local preservationists stepped in and bought some time, but their restoration money ran out in 1989. The building sat closed for another five years until 1994, when George Castro, a real estate executive who had lived in Elizabeth since 1985, bought the theater and rebuilt it from the inside out. In 1995 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of Elizabeth's Midtown Historic District, a designation that recognized the building as one of the state's few surviving examples of a full-scale 1920s movie palace still in operation.
What the Marquee Doesn't Tell You About Who's in the Room
The restoration preserved the plasterwork and the proscenium stage, but the programming decisions since have done more to keep the building alive than the chandeliers ever could. Castro told NJArts.net that he built the calendar around Elizabeth's Hispanic population and the wider Spanish-speaking audience across the region, and that a large share of ticket buyers now travel in specifically for the show rather than dropping by because they happen to live nearby.
"We didn't want to change that charisma because then it becomes boring," Castro said of the theater's Art Deco interior. "You want to maintain and preserve that type of style."
That same interview put a number on the pattern: Castro estimated that about 40 percent of the theater's visitors come from other cities. For a 2,800-seat room in a residential stretch of Elizabeth, that is a meaningful share of every night's crowd arriving from somewhere else entirely, often after seeing the same touring act play a bigger room in New York the night before.
The Names That Have Filled the Marquee This Year
The genre mix tells you why. So far in 2026, the Ritz has run through Michael Ibrahim and Eman Abdelghani in February alongside salsa veteran La India and Colombian vallenato bandleader Binomio de Oro, then Alicia Villarreal and the pairing of Yiyo Sarante and Charlie Aponte in March. A Colombia-France double bill followed in late April. By May the lineup had run through Matute, Rey Ruiz, French pianist Richard Clayderman, Andrés Cepeda, the World Ballet Company, and Palomazo Norteño. Fall keeps the same range going: Puerto Rican Power plays September 18, and Los Hermanos Rosario, the Dominican merengue group touring with Toño Rosario, is booked for October 2. Later listings on the venue's own schedule show dates running into November.
Few venues in Union County book across that many national music scenes in a single season, Dominican merengue, Puerto Rican salsa, Mexican norteño and banda, Colombian vallenato, and French easy-listening piano, sometimes within the same month. That range is exactly what turns a single-city crowd into a regional one. A resident who only associates the Ritz with a school assembly or a one-off comedy show is working from an outdated picture of what the building actually does most weekends.
The Marx Brothers Once Played Here. Now Streaming Services Do.
The theater's earlier decades put some serious names on that same stage, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, and Rat Pack regulars Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin among them. That history has made the Ritz useful to film and television productions looking for an intact period interior without the cost of building one. HBO's miniseries "The Plot Against America" used the building's exterior, covering the marquee with a fictional sign reading "Newsreel" for a story set in Newark. In 2024, the production behind "A Complete Unknown," the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, filmed scenes there. The Ritz also appears under its own name in 2025's "Song Sung Blue," standing in for a theater in Milwaukee.
None of that is a coincidence. A wide-format auditorium built in 1926 and kept largely intact through a string of owners is a rare thing to find fifteen minutes from Manhattan, and it is one more reason the building shows up in places beyond Elizabeth's own event calendar.
If You Want to Catch a Show
The practical side of visiting is straightforward, and worth knowing if you have never actually walked in.
- The theater sits at 1148 East Jersey Street, close enough to the Elizabeth NJ Transit station and Newark Liberty International Airport that flights on approach to EWR pass almost directly overhead.
- Parking is available in city-run Lots A, B, F, G, H, and I, with prices running from $5 to $30 depending on the event.
- The box office keeps regular hours Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with weekend hours tied to whatever is on stage that night.
- The sound system runs on Clair Brothers equipment, and the venue has picked up more than a dozen national accolades for its acoustics, a detail the wide, shallow auditorium design was built for a century ago and still delivers on.
For a building that almost became a parking lot forty-five years ago, that is not a bad second act. It is worth remembering that the Ritz isn't just a preserved piece of Elizabeth's past sitting quietly on East Jersey Street. It is currently one of the more active reasons people from outside the city are driving into it on any given weekend, whether the neighborhood has noticed or not.
If you're weighing a move to a block where a hundred-year-old theater is still pulling in a packed house on a Friday night, or you already live nearby and are thinking about what your own property is worth in a neighborhood with that kind of pull, Pedro Oliveira has spent more than two decades working Elizabeth and Union County block by block. Let's Connect.
