"Yes. And what are we going to do about it?"
That was Joanne Zich's answer when her husband Bob came home in the fall of 2001 ranting about a Washington Post item announcing that the Loews bankruptcy had claimed the Avalon, the single-screen movie house at 5612 Connecticut Avenue that had been running pictures since 1923. Zich, a retired director of electronic programs at the Library of Congress and a 28-year resident of the neighborhood, had already tracked down the building's owner, John Kyle of Bethesda, and asked him a version of the same question. By October he'd gathered a handful of neighbors in his living room and called the group Friends of the Avalon.
What happened next has been told often enough in Chevy Chase that it risks becoming furniture: the public meeting at the Chevy Chase Community Center in April 2002, the Wednesday evening the room filled a tin cup with $2,200 in donations from roughly two hundred neighbors, the developer Doug Jemal, who had originally signed a lease to convert the theater into retail space, ending up contributing labor and funds to save it instead. The Avalon reopened in 2003 as a nonprofit. It is, today, the only nonprofit film center in Washington and the oldest operating movie house in the region. The Tivoli became a different kind of stage. The MacArthur became a CVS. The Uptown in Cleveland Park is only now being revived, under new owners, after closing in 2020.
The part that gets skipped is what happened after the marquee came back on. The Avalon didn't stop needing capital once it stopped needing rescue. It has kept upgrading itself on a roughly ten-year clock, and this fall it did it again.
New Projectors, Not a New Story
The Avalon just installed two new digital laser projectors, funded jointly by attendees of its 2026 gala and a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. It's the kind of announcement that could read as routine equipment maintenance, and in one sense it is. But it's also the fourth time in roughly two decades that the theater has gone looking for outside money to keep itself current rather than simply intact.
Year | What Changed |
|---|---|
2003 | Reopens as a nonprofit theater after community fundraising and volunteer restoration |
2013 | Installs an elevator and accessible restrooms in the upstairs Avalon 2 auditorium |
2023 | Installs rooftop solar panels timed to the theater's 100th birthday and its 20th year as a nonprofit |
2026 | Installs two digital laser projectors, financed by gala donors and a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities grant |
The solar installation alone is projected to save the Avalon roughly $18,000 a year in electricity costs, with an additional $25,000 in solar credits redirected toward theater improvements and programming. That's not preservation money. That's operating money, freed up because someone decided a hundred-year-old building was worth putting panels on.
None of this is automatic. A nonprofit film center doesn't get a capital refresh because it's owed one. It gets one because a gala sells out, or a city arts commission approves a grant, or two hundred people fill a tin cup one night twenty years earlier and set a precedent that the neighborhood keeps honoring. The 2026 projectors are proof the precedent is still active, not proof the story is finished.
The Wednesday Nobody Puts on a Calendar
Most of what makes the Avalon function week to week isn't the first-run studio slate. It's the Wednesday Signature Series, a rotating set of programs you won't find on another DC screen, screened at 8:00pm in the historic downstairs theater. French Cinémathèque, cinePolska, Lions of Czech Film, and Programmer's Choice rotate through the calendar alongside two strands that alternate on a stricter schedule: Avalon Docs runs every other second Wednesday, in February, April, June, August, October and December, while Film in Focus runs every other first Wednesday, in January, March, May, July, September and November. For this fall, that means October's Wednesday slot belongs to Avalon Docs, and November's belongs to Film in Focus, complete with the filmmaker discussion that follows every Film in Focus screening.
There's also Senior Cinema Thursday, a monthly $6-ticket screening with open captions, built for senior groups to attend together. July's installment was sponsored by East Rock Creek Village, one of the neighborhood's aging-in-place support networks, which is a small but telling detail: the theater's community funding doesn't only come from galas and city commissions. It comes from the same civic organizations that run meal trains and volunteer rides.
What's Actually on the Marquee
The first-run slate carries its own fall rhythm. As of late September, Coyote vs. Acme, a New York Times Critics Pick, is running alongside Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, starring Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi. A documentary on James McNeill Whistler has one show left, Saturday, September 26 at 10:30am. After that:
- Friday, October 2 — a new film starring Tom Cruise, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
- Friday, October 23 — Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith
- Friday, November 6 — a film starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell
None of these dates are unusual for a theater chasing first-run distribution deals. What's unusual is that a single-screen nonprofit with no dedicated parking lot is still landing them, on the same marquee that's been lit since Calvin Coolidge was president.
The Program That Runs Underneath All of It
Cinema Classroom at the Avalon brings 1,500 DC public and charter school students to free screenings every year, with bus transportation included, so the cost of getting there never becomes the reason a class doesn't go. It's the kind of program that doesn't show up on a marquee and doesn't sell a single ticket, and it's also the reason the theater's relationship with the neighborhood runs deeper than moviegoing. The Avalon shows up at Chevy Chase DC Day and the Halloween Spooktacular. It supports the Lafayette Elementary School Home & School Association and the Chevy Chase Art Walk. Local retailers and restaurants can join its year-round Business Member Program, offering their own discount to enrolled Avalon members in exchange for having their logo shown before screenings, a small reciprocal arrangement that ties the theater's audience to the businesses around it without either side writing a check to the other.
Bob Zich stepped down as board chair in September 2004 after brain surgery, but he lived to see the theater he'd fought for become something closer to permanent than precarious. Bill Oberdorfer runs the Avalon as executive director today, and Andy Mencher still runs programming, the same person threading the Wednesday series and the first-run bookings into a schedule that has to satisfy studio distributors, documentary purists, and a Thursday crowd of seniors all at once.
Getting There
The Avalon sits just south of Chevy Chase Circle, between McKinley and Northampton Streets, close enough to the same stretch of Connecticut Avenue that carries the corridor's quieter luxury retail a few blocks south. There's no dedicated lot, so plan on street parking along the side streets or Connecticut Avenue itself. By Metro, the closest station is Friendship Heights on the Red Line, either a 15-minute walk or a short ride on the E4 bus, which drops half a block from the box office. The L2 bus also stops directly in front for anyone coming from points south.
The theater doesn't need anyone to treat its history as sacred. It needs the next gala to sell out, the next grant application to land, and the next Wednesday crowd to show up for a Czech film they've never heard of. That's been the pattern for over twenty years, and this fall's projectors are just the most recent proof it's still holding.
We at Jill Schwartz Group pay attention to institutions like the Avalon because they're part of what makes a Wednesday night in Chevy Chase feel like Chevy Chase, not because they show up in a listing description. If you're curious what else defines this stretch of the neighborhood, request a private, confidential consultation and we'll walk you through it in person.
