Cinema Theatre
125 Danbury Road,
Ridgefield,
CT
06877
125 Danbury Road,
Ridgefield,
CT
06877
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I lived there as a kid. My first movie there? 1976’s KING KONG on August 16, 1977 - the day Elvis died.
The current map is correct.
The address was 125 Danbury Road.
The map that was added showing this theater’s former location is way off. It should be in the grey area just to the south of Copps Hill Rd and just to the west of Danbury Rd – Rt 35, which is the Copps Hill Shopping Center.
I found two references in Jack Sanders' Ridgefield (CT) Time Line 1900s:
1976 – The owner of the Ridgefield Cinema at Copps Hill Plaza promises in December that he won’t book any more X-rated movies after a storm of protest over showing of Emmanuelle.
1990 – Ridgefield Cinema, the town’s last movie house, closes in August.
(See “Ridgefield Playhouse” for Ridgefield’s only other theater.)
The Ridgefield Cinema — if it’s the one I’m thinking of (and it must be because it was the only one open in Ridgefield in the 80s) — was not a classic theater. It was built as part of the Copps Hill Plaza shopping center in the early 1970s. The center was anchored by a W.T. Grant, which soon went out of business and was replaced by Caldor and, in turn, Kohl’s, and a Stop & Shop supermarket. The theater closed in the 1980s and its space was used — ironically — by a Blockbuster Video. Two years ago, in a major reconstruction of the shopping center, the entire leg of stores that included the old theater was demolished to permit Stop & Shop to increase parking and expand to a Super Stop & Shop. Smaller stores that remained were moved to a new satellite building. All traces of the theater are gone, but I recall it being a totally nondescript, charmless, beige box. But I did see Mel Brooks' “Blazing Saddles” and Woody Allen’s “Love & Death” there.