The property that held San Francisco's largest movie theater faces uncertain future.
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A historic four-story building at 1000 Van Ness Ave. that once housed one of San Francisco's largest movie theaters has changed hands for $28 million, property records show.
Property owner Site Centers Corp., a publicly-traded real estate investment trust based in Beachwood, Ohio, sold the two-parcel-spanning building to 1000 Van Ness LP — what appears to be an affiliate of Lakeside Investment Co., based in San Francisco. In February the CGV San Francisco theater, one of San Francisco's largest with 14 screens, became the latest among a slew of movie theaters to close around the Bay Area as the pandemic's prolonged shutdown and industrywide struggles took their toll.
Public records indicate that the registrant behind 1000 Van Ness LP — an entity formed late last month — is an employee of Lakeside Investment, which specializes in acquiring well-located, under-valued properties in the Bay Area and maximizing proceeds on sale, per its website.
The sale price would represent a significant discount from the last time the 122,000-square-foot building changed hands. According to public records accessed via PropertyShark, Site Centers Corp. (then known as Developers Diversified Realty Corp.) acquired the multi-parcel property for $34 million in March 2002 from developers BPP/Van Ness L.P.
It's unclear if the buyer will pitch the building to another movie theater tenant or seek redevelopment for another use. The market for movie theater spaces in downtown San Francisco is crowded with the recent closures of the Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema and the Westfield mall's Century Cinemark theater, among others. Redevelopment could imagine creative new uses — at least one local theater has drawn interest for a potential pickle ball court — but it would also require significant upfront investment.
Representatives for Site Centers Corp. and Lakeside Investment Co. did not respond immediately to requests for comment on Tuesday, but I'll update this story if I hear back.
James Kilpatrick, president of NAI Northern California, who represented the buyer in the transaction, said he could not immediately comment on the deal owing to a confidentiality agreement. Jake Levinson, director of Northern California Brokerage Services at Ground Matrix, and who represented seller Site Centers Corp., also declined to comment.
CGV Cinemas, one of the world's largest movie theater chains and based in South Korea, took over the building in September 2021 as the largest of its three U.S. theaters, and invested in technological upgrades that included synchronized motion under the seats and other special effects. However, it reportedly struggled to draw a steady following. CGV America cited the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as an industry-wide decline in movie theater attendance in confirming the closure.
The 101-year-old landmark building was a Cadillac and Lincoln dealership when AMC moved in in the ’90s and after a massive interior renovation, opened in 1998 as the city's then largest multiplex with more than 3,000 seats. In the early 2000s the building was also the late night haunt of dot-com entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh, who in the early days of Zappos installed a 160-seat pan-Asian restaurant (managed by his mother) on the first floor of 1000 Van Ness next door to the offices of his startup incubator, Venture Frogs.
The Don Lee Building was constructed in 1921 as the largest of three architecturally recognized showrooms along the historic Auto Row. Its ornate facade, pulling from Italian Renaissance and Spanish Colonial influences, sparked competition from rival showrooms looking to outdo the flashy design with their own flourishes, enlisting the day's top architectural firms.