A booth hidden in a corner of Sleepy Hollow’s Strand Theatre holds a pair of 35 mm movie projectors, decaying film and empty reels from the 110-year-old building’s heyday.
Weathered wood flooring stretching the length of the building’s cavernous upstairs recalls a short stint as a roller rink in the 1980s.
Exam rooms and cubicles from the medical center that moved out in 2018 fill the ground floor of the structure at 80 Beekman Ave.
Surveying the space during a recent visit, Lou Gruber was focused on the building’s future, not its past.
Gruber, who obtained the theater in 2025 for $1 million through his Sleepy Hollow Long Table LLC, envisions the upstairs rebranded as the Strand Creative Center, an arts hub filled with studios that on weekends would be transformed into a gathering place for cultural events and performances.
The empty 5,000-square-foot space, its high ceiling supported by a latticework of wooden beams, will be changed “as little as possible” to accommodate its new use, he said.
Downstairs is earmarked for Sleepy Hollow Cinema, which has held screenings in the Warner Library and the Lyceum in Tarrytown. The nonprofit pledges a diverse lineup including family favorites, Spanish-language films, indies and especially horror during the village’s immensely popular Halloween season.
The group’s proposal for The Strand calls for a one-screen theater seating 100-120 people plus a lobby and cafe, with a fundraising goal of $950,000 — $200,000 of which must be raised by Aug. 1 to secure a lease. As of late May, $50,000 had been raised from a pair of donors.
“It’s hard to walk into this place and recognize what it was and is and not be totally blown away by the possibilities of this building and this space,” said Gruber. “Where it is, the amount of square footage, the volume of space especially on the second floor, it’s a really special property and building, especially here, when so many buildings like this are gone, lost.”
He added: “Sleepy Hollow has an incredible energy right now. There’s an incredible wealth of people who are investing all along Beekman Avenue and opening businesses here. There’s nothing like it in the Halloween season, the number of visitors we get, just to enjoy the place where we’re all living all the time.”
Mayor Marjorie Hsu said Gruber shared the Board of Trustees’ commitment to the village’s diversity and in bringing more vibrancy to the downtown.
“We have so much creativity and talent in our village that needs a place to make art, bring people together for performances and enliven our downtown,” Hsu said. “I’d love our residents and visitors to have more attractions, for our village to be just a little less sleepy.”
Gruber, whose background is in marketing and video production, is project sponsor for $1.5 million in NY Forward funding for redevelopment of the building, which he estimated would cost between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.
The second-floor Strand Creative Center is a for-profit real-estate venture he founded on the belief it will tap into a trend toward close-to-home cultural options in local communities like Sleepy Hollow.
Gruber’s wife, Jillian Greenberg, senior director of youth and arts programs at Shames JCC on the Hudson, will be assisting in the development of community programming at the Strand. The couple and their children live in Tarrytown.
Amid plaster crunching underfoot and wires hanging down from half-exposed ceilings, Gruber expressed the emotions he experiences when he walks through The Strand’s front door.
“It’s a combination of the immense responsibility of driving this project and being so highly visible to the community and for there to be so much excitement from the community that’s been voiced,” he said. “And it’s the to-do list and just the number of tasks that have to get done. But the biggest thing is just being so grateful for the opportunity and the possibilities of doing something here.”
October Debut
If all goes according to Gruber’s plan, The Strand will host a popup October exhibition themed for Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, the Mexican holiday honoring deceased loved ones that draws upon indigenous rituals and Catholicism.
Authentic representations of the colorful holiday would be created by local artists. Film showings by Sleepy Hollow Cinema could potentially be part of the event.
The exhibit would capitalize on the village’s Halloween tourism as well as a mission to involve Hispanic residents who comprise half of Sleepy Hollow’s population of an estimated 11,400.
Stranded in Time
The building at 80 Beekman Ave. opened as the 800-seat Pollock Theatre in 1915, showing motion pictures. It was rebranded as the Strand Theatre the following year, adding vaudeville acts to its stage.
A Christian congregation began holding Sunday services there 1964, but a few years later Tarrytown Theatre Corp. returned the building to its original purpose. The last film screening was in the 1970s. A second-floor skating rink was installed in 1982.
Open Door Family Medical Center occupied the space from 2009 until moving around the corner on Broadway in 2018.
