Newtown’s historic Hub Theatre sells for $25m

Newtown’s historic Hub Theatre — venue for everything from The Sound of Music to live sex shows — has sold after its owners of the past 58 years received an offer they couldn’t refuse.

The Hub Theatre in Newtown has sold for $25m and is destined to become a queer performance space.

Newtown’s historic Hub Theatre — venue for everything from The Sound of Music to live sex shows — has sold after its owners of the past 58 years received an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Dimitri Vlattas, whose grandfather Chris Louis bought the famous but largely disused building at 7-13 Bedford St for an unknown figure in 1966, says his family has now sold it for a whopping $25m via Jake Fahd, commercial director at The Rubinstein Group (TRG).

The result is among the highest property sales ever in the suburb.

“It’s definitely staying as a theatre and it won’t be knocked down, which is what we feared,” says Dimitri.

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The theatre wasn’t even for sale — buyers made the cracker offer when it was put up for rent.

Worker Abdel Danial mops the floors of The Hub Theatre at Newtown in Sydney, when it was being refurbished in 2014 as a venue for the Cracker Comedy Festival.

“We didn’t have it on the market, we’d just put it up for rental, but the buyers approached us and they said they wanted to purchase it, so everything’s got a price I guess.”

Settlement records show the property has been purchased by Barbara Doreen White, who sources advise wanted the space for her daughter to create a “queer performance space”.

It was Dimitri’s brother, Chris, who passed away suddenly just two months ago, who’d mainly been looking after the theatre’s future, operating community markets there during Covid.

Dimitri says Chris would have been happy with the result.

“We’re sad to see it go, but it was also sad to see it just sitting there — we’d done a full restoration of the building internally in 2014, unfortunately my mother got sick and passed away and everything came to a halt,” he said.

Dimitri’s grandfather was a Greek immigrant who was very successful in real estate.

Reports indicate he started leasing theatres across Sydney in 1959 to show Greek and Italian films.

The entrance foyer of the old theatre.

The art space is set to be repurposed by the new owners.

Dimitri remembers him owning the Enmore Theatre, Cleveland St Theatre in Redfern and the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown that burnt down in 1981, among many others.

The Hub was built in 1913, designed by Walter Newman, the architect behind Broadway’s landmark Grace Bros building, and was converted to an Art Deco cinema in the 1930s.

Kids headed there to watch Mickey Mouse and the Three Stooges.

When Chris Louis took over in the 1960s, everything from The Sound of Music to ethnic films were shown there — in 1971 a bomb went off during the screening of a Yugoslav film and the building was under threat of demolition.

But it survived, and later in the decade it screened porno films and live sex shows which continued until its closure in the early 1990s.

Originally published as Newtown’s historic Hub Theatre sells for $25m