Downtown Delray Beach is Finally Getting A Movie Theatre
Downtown Delray Beach is a fun and exciting place. I love the restaurants there. It seems to have something for everyone: walking, entertainment, restaurants, bars, artsy shops and boutiques. But what it didn’t have was a Delray movie theater. That is about to change now that the new iPic theater has been approved by the City Commission. It is going to be an eight screen theater along with 42,000 square feet of office space and 8,000 square feet of retail space. It will be located between 4th and 5th Avenues, just South of Atlantic Avenue. So it all sounds grand right? Not so fast when you consider the 800 pound gorilla in the room which is getting bigger every day, all across the region. The gorilla is named traffic and it risks destroying the feel and quality of any city anywhere.
This is the biggest issue cities must contend with these days as they allow more and more development. Some will get too greedy and allow too much which will cause too much traffic. Which will lead people to move elsewhere. So how do you escape this growing threat? To be perfectly honest for Delray there will be no escape. The main artery of Downtown, Atlantic Avenue, is already bumper to bumper with traffic every day right now. Once this project and others are built it will become even worse and since it is all on one street there is nowhere for it to go. If the city planners don’t come up with something I think this area will suffer. It is already getting too expensive, especially with respect to retail space. It does remind me a lot of the Soho area of New York when I grew up there. Originally it was very cool and artsy.
Then it became so cool that the national retailers came in there and drove up the prices so high that all the cool people and businesses had to leave for less expensive pastures. That is exactly where Delray Beach is heading right now unless they can somehow figure out a way to change course. And we didn’t even talk about all the new development that is coming West of Swinton Avenue! I am wishing them the best with this challenge but I am sensing some greed here. As always thanks for reading and have a great day.
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