(updated)
By Marc Levy
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Marc LevyThe former AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 at 10 Church St., Cambridge, seen March 18.
Billionaire Gerald Chan is being urged to act on redeveloping a former AMC Loews theater in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. It’s been more than a dozen years since it closed, with Chan the owner for much of that time, and the space is nearing its 100th anniversary.
Chan is being invited to come “answer questions and present his plan” in a policy order on city councillors’ Monday meeting agenda.
There are 23 storefronts in the city that have been vacant for five years or longer, and a March 11 committee meeting suggested there were some 10 owners whom councillors would like to pressure to finally fill them. The Monday invitation, though, is just for Chan.
“He’s the big one, so we’ll start there,” said vice mayor Marc McGovern, writer of the policy order. “Obviously everybody’s hot about the theater, right? It’s been 10 years.”
Dan White, a manager for Chan’s Mayhaw real estate investment firm, said Sunday: “We remain fully committed to bringing forward a new plan to develop the site in an innovative way that will energize both Church Street and Harvard Square.”
“Our previous plan, which was well received and on its way to final approval, was derailed by the pandemic, requiring us to reappraise what might work best for the site. We continue to work diligently on these efforts. Ultimately, our goal is to create a vibrant space on Church Street by developing a venue that will create jobs, help drive visitors to Harvard Square and, most importantly, bring the site back to life and carry it into a new era,” White said.
Plan meets resistance
Marc LevyA proposed cladding for 10 Church St. in Harvard Square is tested June 28, 2019.
The AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 at 10 Church St. closed July 8, 2012, and Chan bought it in 2015 for $17.5 million, adding to his $100 million portfolio of real estate in and around Harvard Square.
In year five of the theater sitting empty on a languishing Church Street, city councillors threatened him with a land taking if he didn’t develop a plan for its use. Chan presented a plan for a 60,000-square-foot building with five stories of office space; street retail; and two lower-level movie screens that would be programmed by a team from the Somerville Theatre. He wanted to cover the building’s facade with digital screens.
Though the plans drew initial excitement – “Gerald Chan has clearly heard the council’s and the community’s concerns,” then-city councillor Leland Cheung said; “The design is fabulous,” said Suzanne Blier, of the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association – the screens also met resistance. There’s been no action on the plan since a June 2019 test of the cladding.
Pall on Church Street
Denise Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, is urging people to write in support of the council order. In a March 19 letter to Chan that she made public Sunday, she asks him to take it seriously.
“I am truly concerned that you may not be fully aware of the negative impact of your building on Church Street,” Jillson wrote. “Gerald, this once-thriving, now desolate and ignored section of Church Street is unsafe and a blight to our district. When it was operational, on average 1,000 people a day visited the theatre. The loss of this entertainment use has had and continues to have an enormous daily adverse impact on the entire district.”
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25880331-031925-hsba-letter/?embed=1
In addition to the loss of nightly first-run movies, the closing meant the end of a local “Rocky Horror Picture Show” phenomenon; the cult classic drew crowds every weekend since it began showing there in 1984. The effect was obvious and immediate, maybe most so at the nearby restaurants. Tex-mex Border Cafe (which left after a fire) once had lines out the door and a regular need for police details to watch over customers. John Schall, owner of the former Fire + Ice at 50 Church St., said he shut down the restaurant after nearly 20 years because he couldn’t recover from the loss of business. “It created a dynamic on Church Street – a loss of traffic and activity that I wasn’t able to recover from,” Schall said in 2017. While there were other factors, “the life of Fire + Ice would have been significantly longer if that building hadn’t remained vacant for the last five years.”
The pall affected businesses all the way to Brattle Street.
“It is not an overstatement to share that nearly every day I am asked about its status,” Jillson said of the empty theater space.
Katie Labrie, executive director of the small-business organization Cambridge Local First, said her experience has been the same since starting work in September. “The state of the property that previously housed the Harvard Square movie theater has been one of the most talked about issues amongst our membership,” Labrie said. “The obvious, wholly detrimental, effects that this particular streetfront vacancy has on our community has become a lightning-rod example of how vacant storefronts negatively impact all of us.”
Hallowed ground
Next year’s 100th anniversary of the structure, with its Trompe-l’œil painting of Charlie Chaplain defaced and a 1999 mural by Beatrice Sargent, is another reason to act, McGovern and Jillson said.
Jillson cited a History Cambridge appreciation of the building:
The Harvard Square Theatre, originally the University Theatre, opened in 1926, with an original entrance on Massachusetts Avenue. The theater could seat 1,640 people, and had wicker chairs and a velvet curtain displaying George Washington commanding the continental army on Cambridge Common. While it was always a movie theater, it also held live performances, including magic shows, vaudeville and rock concerts. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Hall and Oats, the Clash and Bruce Springsteen all played at the University Theatre.
In fact, Bruce Springsteen got his start at the theater. After [Springsteen opened] for Bonnie Raitt in 1974, music critic John Landau wrote, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” The theater also hosted the first “Rocky Horror” stage show in the country, which was played by the full body cast.
“As we approach the 100th anniversary of this beloved and iconic building, we appeal to your sense of decency, love for community, appreciation of art and culture, leadership as a business owner, your solidarity with those who loathe urban blight and deplore the deterioration of public art,” Jillson wrote to Chan. “We implore you to reestablish the theater in time for its 100th anniversary. Take your investment to your community a step further by leading the restoration of the movie theater and reactivating live performances.”
