The ribbon comes down at one o'clock this afternoon at 2 East Main Street in Smithtown, and with it the corner where Main Street bends gets its 1933 face back: a brand-new theater marquee built to look the way the Smithtown Theatre's did the decade it opened. The Smithtown Performing Arts Center's new marquee pairs the sweeping lines and neon-style trim of the original with two modern LED display panels, so the building that anchors downtown Smithtown now announces its shows in lights again, the way it did when the building was Smithtown's picture house.

What went up on Main Street

The new marquee is the most visible piece of an exterior restoration that has been underway at the theater for months. The design deliberately reaches back to the building's first decade: period profile and trim outside, current technology inside, with LED faces doing the work the old changeable letters once did. The Greater Smithtown Chamber of Commerce, which organized today's ribbon cutting, invited elected officials, business owners and theater supporters to mark the completion, and the theater timed the unveiling two days before its fall season opens on the same stage.

The money behind the facelift is public as well as private. Suffolk County awarded the nonprofit that runs the theater $500,000 through its JumpSMART downtown investment program, part of a $5.5 million package announced in late 2023 for projects intended to pull people back into Smithtown's business districts. The county's bet was straightforward: a lit theater is the kind of anchor a downtown organizes itself around. The same 2023 package sent $900,000 toward the Town of Smithtown's plans for the old Calderone Theatre, which means the county has now wagered on Smithtown's stage buildings twice over.

A building the town keeps refusing to lose

The theater opened in the early 1930s as a one-screen movie house with more than 500 seats and a balcony, and its operators marketed it as fireproof at a moment when several other local theaters had burned. It spent decades as Smithtown's picture house, passing to the United Artists chain in 1968 and settling into a long run of second-run features.

Twice since, the building has nearly slipped away. When United Artists put it up for sale in 2001, residents organized a petition to save it, and a private buyer reopened it as a live theater the following year. A nonprofit, the Smithtown Performing Arts Council, formed in 2008 to run it, and when the building went on the market again in 2021, the board, town leaders and local donors rallied a second time. In 2022 the nonprofit bought the building outright, which is the reason the marquee project exists at all: for the first time in the theater's modern history, the people restoring it own it.

Since that purchase, the all-volunteer organization has put well over half a million dollars into the building, inside and out. The marquee is the piece everyone will see, including the drivers who pass the corner of Main Street every day without ever buying a ticket.

The timing is not an accident

The new sign has something to advertise immediately. The theater's fall season opens Saturday, September 19, with Once Upon A One More Time, the Britney Spears jukebox musical, running through October 25. A Bon Jovi tribute lands September 26, a comedy night follows October 10, and Frozen Jr. takes over from late November through the holidays. Tickets for main stage productions run about $28 to $32, and the theater also runs a year-round education program that puts roughly 500 local students on that stage annually, while renting sets, props and costumes to school productions across the area.

For Smithtown, the return of the 1933 look is bigger than signage. Main Street's identity has been argued over for years, through vacancies, streetscape plans and every kind of study. A restored marquee does something none of those documents can: it glows. Drive through town after dark this weekend and the corner at 2 East Main will tell you what is playing, in lights, the way it told your grandparents.