The screen was gone. The seats were gone. The last audience filed out in March 2020, after Landmark Theatres decided a single-screen art house could no longer pencil out in the era of streaming. For five years after that, the marquee read only "now closed." What stayed was the marquee itself, a fixture of the block since December 27, 1946, when the Ken Cinema opened its doors with Sonja Henie in "It's a Pleasure" and Dick Powell in "Murder My Sweet." The building, designed by architect S. Charles Lee in the Art Moderne style that once defined American movie palaces, sat closed while Kensington argued with itself about what should come next.

That argument ended not with a compromise but with a plan almost nobody had proposed out loud: keep the building, gut the inside, and rent it out one suite at a time.

The fight nobody fully won

When Landmark's exit became final, two camps formed fast. One wanted the property redeveloped into housing. Real estate agent and former Rolando Community Council President Doug Lister argued plainly that a multi-story residential building was exactly what the site called for. The other camp organized to stop exactly that. Neighborhood historian and preservationist Maggie McCann led an effort among residents to form a limited liability partnership and buy the building themselves, specifically to head off a high-rise. Longtime resident Mary Wall, who has lived in Kensington since 1996, summed up the emotional math for a lot of her neighbors: "I would love for it to be an indie movie theatre again, but that's clearly not going to happen."

Nobody bought a theater back. Instead, Clayton Companies founder Tom Frenkel purchased the building and, after months of design work, announced plans for what he's calling The Ken Community Suites: eight to ten rental spaces for small businesses, built inside the old auditorium. "I fell in love with Kensington," Frenkel told the San Diego Business Journal when he unveiled the concept in September 2025. It is not a theater. It is also not an apartment tower. For a neighborhood that spent years bracing for one or the other, it landed somewhere neither faction had fully imagined.

What's actually inside the shell

Construction crews unlocked the gates for the first time in five years in late May 2025, according to reporting from the San Diego Reader, and what they found behind the screen became the bones of the new design. Working with San Diego-based Element Design Build Inc. and Scottsdale-based Aline Architecture Concepts, Frenkel's team is restoring the property through a Mills Act contract, the same California preservation program that reduces property taxes for owners who maintain a building's historic character, in exchange for keeping what makes the structure worth saving.

What's staying, based on the project's own leasing description and the Business Journal's account of the build:

• The marquee, with reproduction lettering special-ordered from Wagner Letter Company because the original type is no longer manufactured
• The auditorium's original projector, mounted on display where it once ran the picture
• The curved decking from the old ceiling, partly left exposed overhead and partly repurposed as flooring
• A new mezzanine level built into the space closest to where the screen used to hang, plus a second entrance added on the building's west side for tenant access

A commercial leasing listing for the property describes four to eight individual suites, a smaller range than the eight to ten Frenkel floated at launch, suited to creative office, holistic medical, and small retail tenants, with space still listed for lease as of May 2026. No specific businesses had been named publicly as of that listing, though Frenkel told the Business Journal he expects many of the units to go to people already living in the neighborhood.

The parking fight may have solved itself

In the years after the Ken went dark, one objection came up more than any other. When word spread that the site might become a mixed-use complex, resident Ruth Sigler posted on NextDoor asking where everyone would park, and nine other longtime neighbors said the same thing in their own words. It's a fair question in a neighborhood built on narrow lots with limited street parking, and it's the same question that sinks a lot of infill proposals in older San Diego neighborhoods regardless of what's being built.

What actually got approved may have defused that argument without adding a single space. A single-screen theater concentrates its entire customer base into a narrow window: everyone arrives at roughly the same time before a showing and leaves at roughly the same time after. That's the parking crunch people picture when they hear "commercial reuse." A building full of four to eight independent small businesses, creative offices, a holistic health practice, a retail tenant, doesn't work that way. Those are staggered schedules, walk-in customers spread across a workday, and appointment-based traffic that rarely peaks all at once. Nobody at the Historic Resources Board designed the suites layout as a parking fix. But the shift from one large audience at one time to several small ones spread across the day is, functionally, the closest thing to a solution the building's opponents and defenders could have agreed on without ever sitting down to negotiate it.

The block it's rejoining

Whatever moves into those suites will be opening onto a stretch of Adams Avenue that already runs on its own rhythm. Stehly Farms Market, a full-service grocery with a deli, juice bar, and dog-friendly patio, sits a few doors down and has anchored that stretch of the avenue for years. On Sundays, the Kensington Farmers' Market sets up from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Oak View Avenue at Colusa Circle, a few blocks off the main drag. Adams Avenue itself hosts a full calendar of organized street life through the Adams Avenue Business Association, including the Taste of Adams Avenue, which drew tickets sold out for its 25th annual run on June 28, 2026, featuring tastings from 45 restaurants, cafes, and bars stretching through Kensington, Normal Heights, and University Heights. The Kensington Talmadge Business Association counts nearly 100 member businesses along Adams Avenue and El Cajon Boulevard, from Kensington Cafe to Mission Brewing to the pediatric dentist most parents in the neighborhood already have on speed dial.

The Ken sits in the middle of all of it, on a block that has spent decades functioning as a walkable town center in miniature rather than a strip anyone drives through. A vacant marquee in that setting isn't just an empty storefront. It's a gap in the sequence of businesses that makes the walk down Adams Avenue worth taking in the first place. Whatever fills those suites will be judged less on square footage and more on whether it fits into that sequence.

What stays constant

Buildings like The Ken don't get saved by accident, and they don't get restored cheaply. The same Mills Act framework financing Frenkel's renovation is the tool a lot of Kensington's Spanish Revival and Craftsman homeowners already use to keep their own properties standing without pricing themselves out of their tax bills. It rewards the same instinct on a commercial scale: keep the bones, keep the character, and let the building earn its keep in a form the current market can actually support.

That instinct, preserving what a place is rather than replacing it with what's easiest to build, is the thread running through Kensington's last five years, from the fight over the Ken to the quieter work of restoring the bungalows and revival homes that line the streets around it. Hernholm Group spends its days advising owners of exactly that kind of property across Mission Hills, Bankers Hill, and the historic pockets of central San Diego, including homes just like the ones a block or two off Adams Avenue. If you're weighing what a Mills Act designation could mean for a property you already own, or you want first look at the kind of architecturally significant homes that rarely make it to public listing, get access to exclusive listings before they're public.