Meet Coney Island’s new dreamland.
The new owners of the Shore Theater are shopping around fanciful renderings of what the century-old landmark might look like when they’re done turning it back into a playhouse and hotel. The drawings depict a tree-lined Stillwell Avenue, a glass facade along the landmark building, and even a pool on top, but they are still a fantasy at this point, a broker said.
“Everything is incredibly preliminary,” according to a source at Commercial Acquisitions, which is finding tenants for theater owners Pye Properties. “The flyer is really what their hopes are, but we are really far off from that — it could be anything in the future.”
The renderings, which also read “The new Coney Island,” were fist published by the Coney Island Blog.
Pye Properties bought the theater in January with plans to return the long-derelict icon to its former glory, but it has not given a timeline for renovations.
The broker is targeting national-level tenants — for example Starbucks Coffee and clothing retailer TJ Maxx — which typically take longer to hammer out deals for space, he said.
He is also trying to woo Community Board 13, whose Surf Avenue office is above a strip club and next to the elevated train. The group’s district manager said the board is interested in moving, but declined to talk specifics.
The theater was built as the Loew’s Coney Island in 1925 and hosted vaudeville shows before it was transformed into a movie house. Another company bought it in the mid-1960s and changed its name to the Shore Theater — replacing the a marquee reading “Loews” with the iconic “Shore” sign that Hurricane Sandy mangled beyond repair.
The place showed porno flicks for about a decade, then millionaire fried-chicken and real-estate mogul Horace Bullard bought it in 1978 hoping to redevelop it into a casino and hotel. But the state put the kibosh on the plan, and Bullard let the theater sit vacant.
The city declared it a landmark in 2010, even though it had become a haven for squatters and magnet for graffiti writers. Bullard died three years later, and Pye Properties paid his daughter $20 million for the theater in January.
The new owners declined to comment.
