Sunny Isles Twin
3025 Sunny Isles Boulevard,
North Miami Beach,
FL
33160
3025 Sunny Isles Boulevard,
North Miami Beach,
FL
33160
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This late-1960’s twin theatre featured the then common ABC Florida State Theatres design that was made up of two diagonally attached rectangular auditoriums and a round lobby with a large glass front.
Opening as the Aquamarine and Driftwood auditoriums, they soon became Twin I and II. At opening both screens played alternating showings of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.
The round glass lobby featured a unique ceramic floor tile design with an aquarium motif. Photos featuring ABC’s waterfront attractions Weeki Washee and Silver Springs parks were on display and were also advertised on the screen before each film.
Each auditorium featured high-back rocking chair seats and excellent sight lines on huge screens. The seats and carpets were colored burnt orange and aqua blue to match their names with the Aquamarine screen being the largest seating over 700. Reserved seats were common in the early years, a practice that was abandoned when roadshow releases became rare.
Contributed by
Al Alvarez
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Recent comments (view all 20 comments)
If you type in a current address,
3025 Sunny Isles Boulevard, 33160
You can actually see the twin auditoria and round lobby incorporated into the existing mall on this Bing map.
View link
Great ad Mike Rivest,could look at them all night.Thanks.
Better view than the mapping that I mentioned in March of 2009 – Google, at the time, only had a street view, I think.
On further address research, the furniture store still stands:
View link
“Located in an old movie theatre, the architecture is as interesting as the furniture.” Scan Design seems to appreciate their home more than the City of Miami appreciates the Gusman right now.
Sometime in the 1980s, there was an attempt to refit the Sunny Isles as a twin Cinema & Drafthouse. Renderings appeared in the local press, but it never happened.
I’m assuming that the great details of the lobby are long gone – the tile work, etc. It was the most beautiful theater of the 60s, that I can remember. We’re lucky, in San Antonio, to have the older restored theaters (MAJESTIC, EMPIRE, AZTEC), but none of the 60s theaters survived. But we had NOTHING like this one (that I know, since I grew up in Miami, as a kid).
In Austin, the Americana (1965) was pretty awesome – now a library. But the interior is gone. Nicely converted, though.
oh, Mary Colehower was managing here on June 3 1983.
“Chitty” was in 1968 – it didn’t open the theater. Ads say “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.”
Twin one was “Driftwood”. Twin two was “Aquamarine”.
The lovely Mary Colehower, I think, closed it.
I uploaded the December 16th, 1966 grand opening ad here.