Highlander Drive-In
4331 Antelope Road,
Sacramento,
CA
95843
4331 Antelope Road,
Sacramento,
CA
95843
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Update on the Hi-Lander…BJ Nartker is a frequent YouTube-r who has done short documentaries on the North Sacramento area, and many years ago he did a feature-length documentary on the Sunrise Drive-in in Fair Oaks/Citrus Heights. Years before he conceived the documentary, he took home movie VHS footage of the many drive-ins in the Sacramento valley that had since closed, and the Hi-Lander Drive in was one of those drive-ins represented. You can see this footage as part of a piece Nartker did called “Remember the Sacramento Area Drive-Ins” (just do a YouTube search of it). The footage begins at 7:27 of the video, and it was taken in 1982, seven years after it closed. At the time, the deteriorating screen was still up, the marquee destroyed, and both the box-office and the snack bar/projection screen dilapitated. Again, this is a case of “picture in your mind what it was like to visit”.
No trace of the Hi-Lander remains today, as it is now an area of houses built on streets named after movie stars (a subtle reminder of what the theatre once was).
Based on Google Maps' city borders, the Hi-Lander wasn’t very close to Sacramento, over four miles away from the city’s nearest corner.
Maps says that the site is across Antelope Road from North Highlands, an unincorporated, census-designated area that was the source of the drive-in’s name and which was contemporaneously used as its location. But Maps says old Hi-Lander site is currently in Antelope, yet another census-designated area.
Anyway, after a big run-in with Sacramento County officials over noise complaints and X-rated movies, the Hi-Lander “shut down in September” 1975, according to its lawyer’s remarks a couple of months later. He assured the district attorney “that it would be used as a storage area instead of a theater.”
The streets where the drive-in was are named after golden age actors like Hepburn, Garbo, Bogart etc.
This opened on October 13th, 1961 as the Hi-Lander Drive-In. Grand opening ad posted.