The Highland Theatre Marquee Is Still Dark. Here's What Highland Park Built Around It This Year.

Walk north on Figueroa past Avenue 56 after 9 p.m. and the block tells you two different stories at once. At 5604, the Highland Theatre's rooftop sign sits black, all 502 bulbs off, the same way it's looked most nights since February 2024. Cross the street and Lodge Room is loud, a line forming under its marquee for whatever's playing that night. Walk half a block to Highland Park Bowl and the sound carries from the alleys and lanes inside, past whatever's happening in the hidden tiki bar in back. The theater didn't take the neighborhood's nightlife down with it when it closed. It just left one specific hole that the block has spent two years figuring out how to work around.

That's the more useful story here, more useful than another recap of the celebrity purchase. The purchase already happened. What's worth understanding if you live here is what Highland Park quietly rebuilt around the Highland while it sat dark, and the one piece nobody's managed to replace.

What Changed Since February, and What Didn't

Kristen Stewart's purchase became public on February 4, 2026, when Architectural Digest ran her account of buying the theater and wanting to restore it as a community space rather than a standard commercial cinema. What most coverage that week didn't dwell on: the sale itself wasn't news to the deal. According to CoStar, the LLC that includes Stewart closed on the building back in March 2025, paying seller Cyrus Etemad just shy of $7 million, almost a year before anyone outside the transaction knew about it. The neighborhood learned about a done deal, not a fresh one.

Since then, the public record hasn't moved much. Stewart told Jimmy Fallon on August 10 that the plan is still taking shape, joking that her real fear was watching the building turn into an Urban Outfitters. No permit filings have surfaced with the city, and no renovation timeline has been announced. For a building carrying Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status since 1991, that's not unusual. Any real work on the exterior, including that marquee, runs through a preservation review process that takes time regardless of who's writing the checks.

The Three Things That Already Filled the Gap

While the ownership question sorted itself out, the neighborhood didn't wait around. Three things absorbed most of what the Highland used to do:

• Highland Park Bowl, a block or two south on Figueroa, kept the after-dark social scene alive, including the hidden tiki bar tucked behind its bowling lanes.
• Lodge Room, directly across the street from the theater, kept live performance and ticketed shows running on the same corner.
• Tierra De La Culebra Park picked up the actual movie-watching, with free community film screenings that started as a stopgap right after the Highland's 2024 closure and are still the closest thing to a neighborhood screening in Highland Park itself.

Put those three together and you've covered drinks, live shows, and even the occasional outdoor movie without setting foot inside 5604 Figueroa. That's a genuinely different picture than the one you get from most coverage of the sale, which tends to frame the theater's absence as a hole in the neighborhood's identity. The identity held up fine. What's missing is narrower than that.

The One Function Nobody Replaced

None of those three substitutes gives you an indoor room in Highland Park where you can sit down and watch a film any night of the week. For that, the nearest first-run theaters are in Pasadena or Glendale. The nearest repertory house is Vidiots, a short drive into Eagle Rock. The Vista, the other Lewis Arthur Smith theater everyone keeps comparing the Highland to, sits several miles away near the Los Feliz and Silver Lake line. Highland Park itself, for the moment, doesn't have a single indoor screen.

That gap matters most to the Highland Park Independent Film Festival, which ran out of the theater for a decade before the 2024 closure. The festival hasn't had that home since, and nothing on Figueroa or York has stepped in to replace a 1,432-seat historic house with a stage and mezzanine. Lodge Room can host a screening. It can't replicate the specific thing a film festival needs, which is a purpose-built theater that isn't also trying to sell drink tickets on a Friday night.

That's the actual scarcity here. Not nightlife, not live music, not even outdoor movies in a park. Just one indoor room, in the neighborhood, built for watching films together. Everything else got patched. That piece didn't.

Why It Sat Empty for Two Years Anyway

The financial history explains why nobody moved faster. Etemad bought the building in 2022 for $5.3 million, kept it running for roughly two years, and closed it in February 2024 after it lost money every week it stayed open, according to the operator at the time. He then sold it about a year later for just under $7 million, meaning the building gained close to $1.7 million in value while it was shuttered and losing money as a working theater.

That's not the arithmetic of a cash-flowing cinema changing hands. It's the arithmetic of a landmark changing hands. Whoever bought the Highland was never buying a functioning business. They were buying a 1925 building with murals, a mezzanine, and a rooftop sign, at a price that already priced in a full renovation rather than a quick reopening under new management. That's worth knowing if you've been wondering why the marquee didn't just flip back on with a new tenant the way a closed restaurant might. This was never going to be that kind of transaction.

What to Actually Watch For

Jamie Tijerina, president of the Highland Park Heritage Trust, put the neighborhood's cautious read on the sale simply: "It's really positive that we have somebody who is willing to make this a theater again." Lance Simon, who organizes the Highland Park Film Festival, said much the same thing from a different angle, hoping the new owners' public promises about community use hold up once the renovation gets underway.

The markers that will actually tell you something are boring ones. A permit filing with the city. A formal plan submitted for review given the building's monument status. A firm date, which as of this writing doesn't exist anywhere in public reporting. Until one of those shows up, the fair assumption is that this stays a multi-year project, not a multi-month one.

For Now, the Block Still Works

None of this means Highland Park is waiting around for a movie theater to feel complete. The Saturday and Friday-night routine that's built up around Highland Park Bowl, Lodge Room, and the occasional free screening at Tierra De La Culebra Park works fine on its own terms. When the Highland does reopen, whether that's next year or three years from now, it won't be filling an empty block. It'll be adding the one piece that's actually been missing, back into a strip that never stopped running without it.

If you're curious what else has shifted on Figueroa and York while all this plays out, or you're weighing what a corridor like this does to home values on the surrounding blocks, that's the kind of conversation Bigtown Homes has every week. Take a look at our Highland Park neighborhood guide or schedule a strategy call, and let's talk about what's actually happening on your street this year.