Tien Lung Chen, a business executive based in Beverly Hills, leads an ownership group that paid $5 million in cash to a trust that includes descendants of original owner John Muldoon, according to documents filed with the Alameda County Assessor\u2019s Office on Monday, April 20.<\/p>\n
The sale of the theater at 2115 Kittredge St. comes less than a year after Gilbane Development Company withdrew plans with its partner, the California Theater Consortium, to build an 18-story housing complex with a performance space that would preserve the theater\u2019s original facade.<\/p>\n
It is unclear what Chen plans to do with the Berkeley building.<\/p>\n
In addition to this project, Chen is part of an ownership group that owns the Exotic Dreams Resort<\/a> in Palm Springs. It is described as a \u201cclothing optional\u201d swingers hotel that bills itself as \u201cone of the most exciting, liberal and open-minded resorts in California,\u201d with the tagline, \u201cWhere Lifestyle Couples Party, Play, & Stay,\u201d according to its website.<\/p>\n The California Theatre is an Art Deco-style building that had been more or less continuously operating as a movie theater since the Italian epic \u201cCabiria\u201d opened there on Dec. 9, 1914. It was last operated as a movie venue by Landmark Theatres, which took over operations in 1994, but closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and never reopened.<\/p>\n It officially shuttered in 2021, part of a wave of post-pandemic closings, which included Landmark\u2019s Shattuck Cinemas<\/a> and Regal UA Berkeley<\/a>, that left downtown Berkeley without any first-run movie theaters for the first time in more than a century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tien Lung Chen, a business executive based in Beverly Hills, leads an ownership group that paid $5 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[329,184,7,3010,332,838,143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-285689","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-arts-and-entertainment","9":"tag-bay-area","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-commercial-real-estate","12":"tag-east-bay","13":"tag-movies-and-tv","14":"tag-oakland","15":"tag-oakland-headlines","16":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}