The Williams Center (theater)

About

The Williams Center is an arts center and cinema complex located in downtown Rutherford, New Jersey. The center was named after the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and physician William Carlos Williams, who had been born and raised in the borough. The building it occupies was originally built in the 1920s as a Vaudeville theater known as the Rivoli. The Rivoli soon started showing silent movies, and eventually "talkies". The theater enjoyed success, until fire destroyed part of the building in 1977. In 1978, a group of philanthropists started the Williams Center Project, which reopened the Center in 1982. The center currently has two live theaters, three cinemas, and an open-air meeting gallery. As of 2021, the town of Rutherford bought the center from Bergen County, before selling it to local real estate developer Native Development; those sales, along with outcry from concerned local residents, were said to have saved the property from further redevelopment.