When I was in high school, one of our pre–standardized exam prep prompts asked us to posit what we’d do with the abandoned Kings Park Psychiatric Center properties if we were at the helm of town planning. Cinephile that I am, I proposed building a drive-in movie theater.
Twelve years later—still no dice.
Conversely, when a movie theater goes out of business, the flags inside my mind instantly fly at half-mast. There are but fewer than a handful of new vacants I would actually welcome in their stead. The topic enters my mind when I think of the recently canceled Islip movie apartment project. What’s to come now? Corner bar? Corner bar?? Corner bar???
Meanwhile, over in Long Beach, a Chipotle Mexican Grill is heading to the retail space that formerly belonged to the locally beloved landmark Long Beach Cinemas, which closed its doors back in April 2023.
Now, don’t get me wrong—and Long Beach Facebook group posters, maybe look away—the closing of any movie theater is never to be celebrated (lest that movie theater was inside the super-mall construction threatening the old neighborhood in “Hey Arnold!: The Movie”). But if the vacant area was going to be claimed by anything else, what better than a Chipotle? There really can never be enough.
The fast-casual “build-your-own” chain was founded inside a Denver ice cream shop in 1993. Three decades later, the company operates over 3,800 restaurants nationwide, including 36 on Long Island.
The more Chipotles we have, the less distance we travel—and therefore, the more often we can afford to frequent Chipotle and earn our bang for our buck. Having one everywhere we would, could, and should be then becomes its own kind of movie: one wherein we are the writer, director, and star of both our short-game self-satiation and our longer road to fine-palated happiness.
As for the so-called theatrical moviegoing crisis, the pushback from the cape-sick isn’t falling on exclusively deaf ears any longer; so much so that I just saw a movie at AMC East Northport written and directed by—and starring—Aziz Ansari. Last time I checked, he had been cancelled (perhaps unduly so—a story for another day).
See what I’m getting at? No matter how many theaters there are, people will still go and with their appetite for variety in tow. Whereas if Chipotles started getting Thanos-snapped out of our purview, so too would each individual storefront’s respective turnouts—for as the late Yankee great Yogi Berra famously said, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
Save for the wintertime, Long Beach shall remain a hotbed for outdoor leisure. It seems many locals are keen on principle-boycotting the forthcoming Chipotle—well, more for us then when we’re visiting Jenny.
And who could blame them, really? After all, not even the Corleone Compound is truly theirs, as the iconic Long Beach digs for “The Godfather’s” royal family calls Staten Island home in real life.
In short, leave the chip; take the guacamole.