El Cerrito Spent Years Saving Its Movie Palace. This Fall, the Party Spills Onto the Greenway.

On November 1, 2006, the Cerrito Theater at 10070 San Pablo Avenue showed movies again after spending about four decades as a furniture storeroom. It has been running for twenty years now. Most of El Cerrito's October and November calendar comes from the groups who made that reopening possible and from the people who did the same thing for the Ohlone Greenway. Read the season's events side by side and they look less like a list of things to do and more like a town marking the public places its own residents rescued.

A 1937 Theater That Became a Warehouse

The Cerrito opened on Christmas Day, 1937. William B. David designed it as an Art Deco cinema sized for a neighborhood, and it was a joint venture between Henry Goldenberg and the Blumenfeld theater chain. The original interior had murals, a distinctive lobby, etched glass and Deco light fixtures, and some of those pieces are still there.

The theater's records don't agree on exactly when the movies stopped. One Friends of the Cerrito page says newspaper listings vanished in 1963 and the building sold in 1966. Another says the theater closed in the early 1960s. Either way, the building spent the following decades as storage for Kiefer's furniture business.

How the Building Came Back

When the building went on the market, Friends of the Cerrito began organizing in 2001 to save it along with whatever artwork had survived. An open house drew about 3,000 people, and then the City bought the property.

The restoration money came from several places. Most of it was a loan from the El Cerrito Redevelopment Agency. Speakeasy Theaters, the first operator, also put in money, and local groups raised more for the historic details. SFBay's 2018 coverage credits Friends member David Weinstein with spearheading the restoration and reopening effort.

The timeline matters for this year's anniversary. Speakeasy Theaters ran the theater when it reopened in 2006. In 2009 the operator announced it would close, and Rialto Cinemas started screenings on July 15, 2009. So the twentieth anniversary marks the community-led reopening. Rialto's own run there is about three years shorter.

The Clause That Keeps It a Theater

In 2018 the City Council approved selling the building to Rialto Cinemas for $790,000. The deed requires the building to be used for cinema or performance for 99 years and protects its historic features. That deed is the part of the rescue that still shapes the theater today. Rialto owns the building, but the deed controls what the building can be used for.

The company still runs the theater. A Mercury News profile from November 2025 described Rialto as independently owned and operated, with three locations: the Elmwood in Berkeley, the Cerrito, and Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol. Director Ky J. Boyd told the paper the group's survival comes down largely to careful programming at a time when competitors have closed under rising rents and streaming. The Cerrito has two screens.

Some of the practical details:

• The kitchen makes pizza, burgers, shareables and salads. The Mercury News reported that food can be brought to your seat.
• The bar has eight beers on tap and sells wine by the glass or bottle.
• On Tuesdays, films show with open captions where available.
• The Friends history notes that the renovated auditoriums have an elevator, wheelchair seating, and assistive captioning and description systems.

The Greenway Had One Tree

The Ohlone Greenway's El Cerrito stretch has a similar history, just with plants instead of a theater. In the early 1990s, according to the El Cerrito Historical Society, the city's two miles of Greenway had exactly one tree, and someone cut it down. The Society credits today's green corridor to volunteers, a city contract arborist, and a dedicated city official and staff.

The Greenway also has its own small mystery. A sign reading "You Are Now Entering the Dinosaur Forest" stands where the Greenway crosses Schmidt Lane. Even the El Cerrito Trail Trekkers call its story mysterious.

Schmidt Lane comes up again this October. The City's Recycling + Environmental Resource Center, at 7501 Schmidt Lane, is offering a free public tour.

The Calendar the Rescuers Built

These dates come straight from the people involved: Rialto's schedule, the Friends of the Cerrito, the El Cerrito Historical Society and the City. Calendars can change, so check the organizer's page before you go.

Three of these dates come from preservation groups, and each looks back at a rescue or a building worth knowing.

The November 9 anniversary night covers how the theater was saved, restored and rebuilt. The Historical Society will also screen "The Last Pictures Shows," a new documentary by Rustin Thompson about people preserving movie theaters across the West. Refreshments will be for sale.

The Cerrito Classics series is presented by Friends of the Cerrito, and Little Shop of Horrors plays on October 29 at 6 p.m. It is the same group that began organizing the rescue in 2001.

The "Greening the Greenway" walk is free and has two guides. Steve Price organized the planting and led the volunteers. Steve Batchelder was the city's consulting arborist at the time. The group meets at 10 a.m. at the Greenway at Fairmount Avenue, across from El Cerrito Plaza BART, and walks a flat two miles to Del Norte BART. According to the Society, every block along the way has its own story, the Dinosaur Forest included.

The Don Hardison tour on October 10 visits a well-preserved house he built in 1952, just over the Richmond line. Hardison was a Bay Tradition modern architect. His firm designed the Zellerbach-Student Union complex at UC Berkeley and the Easter Hill housing in Richmond. Architectural journalist Dave Weinstein will speak, along with homeowner Jan Brown, a designer and the Hardisons' daughter. The event is free, but spaces are limited. The Society said it would give preference to members who RSVPed before October 1 and would put non-members who RSVPed by then on a waiting list.

The City's chalk art event on October 17 comes the day before United Against Hate Week starts. The week runs October 18 to 24, and the event takes place on the Greenway next to Centennial Park.

What's Changing Along the Walk

The November 15 walk starts next to the busiest construction site on the corridor. Parcel A South, at 515 Richmond Street, broke ground on March 6, 2026, on part of a BART-owned surface parking lot. It is a six-story building with 70 affordable homes and the first phase of a planned 743-home transit-oriented development at El Cerrito Plaza. The City's corridor project map, dated September 4, 2026, still lists it as under construction. Completion estimates range from early to mid 2027 depending on the source, so the building will probably still be fenced when the walkers set off.

Fairmount Avenue has turned over too. Sweet Potatoes Up Beet Cafe at 6401 Fairmount had closed by mid-September. By September 29, East Bay Nosh reported that Cafe Buenos Aires had opened in El Cerrito at the same address. It is the Argentine café's fourth shop, joining one in West Berkeley and two in San Francisco. It serves empanadas, including two vegan ones, plus coffee drinks, smoothies, alfajores and other pastries.

San Pablo Avenue is still in planning. The Contra Costa Transportation Authority's corridor study hasn't chosen a final design. Its tentative schedule had concept evaluation in fall and winter 2026 and recommendations in 2027. A separate Caltrans safety and paving project, covering the stretch from the Alameda County line to I-80 through El Cerrito and Richmond, is expected to be built between 2027 and 2029. In other words, the street the Cerrito faces will look different within a few years, and the building itself is protected as a theater until the 2110s.

Anastasia Levitansky follows how projects like Parcel A South and the San Pablo Avenue plans change the blocks around El Cerrito's landmarks. If you own near the Greenway or San Pablo and want to know what that means for your property, schedule a strategy consultation.