Abandoned Movie Theater Sayreville, New Jersey -

On a recent trip back from the Jersey Shore to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn by way of the Outerbridge, this location caught my eye. An “eyesore” for many is pleasing to mine… a dilapidated multiplex, covered in plywood, tagged and overgrown with weeds. Ah, such things lure me in, boggle my mind with compositional opportunities. It would easily advance to the top of my Jersey itinerary.

And so I soon found myself walking swiftly towards the structure, through its enormous parking lot, ready for the unknown. This feeling is the exploration opiate, what has me always seeking… in a world with bold black borders of safety and liability, this is a spatial rebellion, this is the intersection of archive and disorder, tucked away but exploding, time manifested and my want to grasp each of these things… in my eye and under foot, inserting myself inside their decaying glory. Here’s a movie theater that died.

The theater, which opened in 1979, was built on the adjacent marshland of the Raritan River. In 2005 it was determined to be sinking, and the theater’s leadership closed voluntarily ahead of the busiest movie weekend of the year (Memorial Day weekend). Since it had closed with no notice, all was left as is… including the marquee of movies it was showing at the time. Though it has certainly been visited plenty in the 18 years that followed, it is in many ways a time capsule.

Star Wars, Episode 3 got me real excited.

The concessions

Throwing it back to Slice

Waiting for the movie to start

One of the largest theaters had a gaping hole in the roof. This improved the light.

Projector parts lay on some of the theaters’ floors. The projectors were once all in the upstairs. Seeing them crashed into the floor made us a bit fearful of walking upstairs to see the projector rooms.