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The Islip Planning Board approved the Islip Theater Lofts project for downtown Islip on May 4, 2022.
The Town Board followed with its own project approval on March 16, 2023.
Now, the developers are getting set to transform the shuttered Islip Cinemas into a mixed-use building with apartments and a restaurant — and are seeking permits for interior demotion and alterations.
Queens-based Global Team LI LLC is also currently going through site plan review, Islip Town officials said.
And a sign went up last week announcing Islip Theater Lofts will be “coming soon.”
In the meantime, the project’s broker, Mogil Realty Group, is looking to market space in the new complex. The renderings reveal a nearly 3,000-square-foot restaurant planned for the ground floor at 410 Main St.
A site plan filed with the Town of Islip also shows an adjoining outdoor dining garden.
The project has been in the works for over three years.
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All along, the developers had been looking to complete the project in accordance with the town’s Planned Landmark Preservation (PLP) district overlay.
“The project seeks to attract young professionals by creating attractive apartments using the existing footprint of the building and beautifying the existing brick façade, while celebrating the building’s 75-year-old history,” said Guy Germano, an attorney representing the applicants at a Town of Islip Planning Board Meeting in October of 2021.
Splayed out on the southeast corner of Main Street and Smith Avenue, with its distinctive neon marquee lighting up the word “Islip” on its facade, the theater that first opened on April 5, 1947 has welcomed visitors to downtown Islip from the west for generations.
An ad from the opening of the theater found on theater history website Cinema Treasures promotes the theater’s grand opening weekend with a showing of “The Ziegfeld Follies” starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.
Tickets were 35 cents each for an adult and 20 cents for a child. Movies were shown “at popular prices in a most advanced atmosphere,” according to the advertisement. Yet that advanced atmosphere did not keep up with the times.
The theater survived the rise of multiplexes and, later, home movie rentals, by expanding its viewing screens to three in 1980s.
The Islip Cinema Lofts plan would see the entire building renovated and updated.
The site plan shows that the count of apartments will consist of 16 studios, two 1-bedrooms, and five duplex/lofts, for 23 units in total.
The tenant entrance and lobby would be off of Smith Street, accessed by an open garden entryway. The proposed 2,923-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor would also have a 663-square-foot outdoor dining area off Smith Street.
The developers could not be reached for an expected project start date.
During the planning process, members of the public did have parking concerns with the project, something the developers pledged to allay with the town through various measures.
Parking concerns for that building actually go back to its heyday. A 1947 Newsday story stated that locals bitterly opposed the theater’s construction.
The main concern at the time?
Not enough parking.
