Beach Drive-In
1200 Shetter Avenue,
Jacksonville Beach,
FL
32250
1200 Shetter Avenue,
Jacksonville Beach,
FL
32250
2 people
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The Beach Drive-In at Jacksonville Beach was opened prior to 1952 when it was operated by the Talgar Theatre Company chain. It was closed in 1959 when it was operated by Kent Theatres. It was demolished in July 1960.
Contributed by
Dave Bonan
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Recent comments (view all 11 comments)
I don’t remember this theater when it was open,but I do remember the screen being left up for a long time after it closed.The screen was one of those concrete block screens and it had a CocaCola ad on the back.It was a trailer park for a long time with the screen still there and the projection booth/snack bar had been converted to the leasing office.Not sure when it was demolished,but it’s gone now.It was on Beach Blvd,near the intersection of Penman.
We used to go to this drive in but it could never show wide screen because the screen building was too small. Also they built the screen facing west so the start time in the summer was always late, now a storage place.
Article and picture on Beach Drive-In here (sorry for bad repro):
View link
At the Historic Aerials website, an overhead shot of the old Beach Drive-In Theatre can be seen. The earliest view that can be recalled is 1960, the year it closed. It can be accessed by typing in it’s address, which is 1200 Shetter Avenue. Also, the link Harvey provided has some brief but interesting information about the theatre, and a color shot of the old three-sided screen tower can be seen in the book ‘The American Drive-In Movie Theatre’, on page 26.
Jacksonville’s BEACH DRIVE IN parked 300 caes and was owned by Taglar Theatres.They owned several Drive ins in the SunShine State.
J.T. McCormick built this drive in, in a Jacksonville interview with Journalist,Ann Hyman he said"He never went there to see a movie,he perferred his open air screened in."
Video from 1997: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0dy-kYfUtA
THANK YOU FloridaDriveIns and Mike Rogers for the information and video! Here’s another question for either of you, or anyone else with knowledge about the following. There’s a drive-in theatre still in operation in Lakeland, FL called the Silver Moon, and it’s screen tower looks exactly like the Beach’s. Is there a possibility that Mr. McCormick built that theatre, too, or that the two screen towers were built by two separate owners from an early common design exclusive to Florida? Thank you, again.
Boxoffice, July 25, 1960: “The Beach Drive-In, Jacksonville Beach, operated for the past several years by Kent Enterprises, has been sold and dismantled for commercial development adjacent to a large shopping center.”
Listings for this drive-in ended in 1959.