Five Points Is a Music District Again

There's a particular kind of Jacksonville optimism that involves pointing at an old building and insisting it'll come back. Usually it doesn't. The Riverside Theater at 1028 Park St did.

The building opened in March 1927 as the Riverside Theater — the first movie house in Florida, and reportedly only the third in the country, wired to show talking pictures, which in 1927 was roughly the equivalent of installing a rocket in your garage. Roy Benjamin designed it in an Italian Renaissance style, and the first feature that flickered across its screen was Don Juan, John Barrymore's, at a steep $1.10 a ticket. Then came the long American arc: decline, dark years, a building too handsome to demolish and too big to easily reuse.

Enter FIVE. On May 13, 2025, Nashville-based Marathon Live reopened the room as a ~1,250-capacity concert hall, keeping the historic façade and interior bones while wiring in modern sound and light, an expanded balcony, and — the detail that makes local preservationists grin — a VIP loft carved out of the old projection booth. The inaugural show was BoyWithUke, and the first months brought a genuinely eclectic run through the doors: Kameron Marlowe, Turnover, Aly & AJ, Bowling for Soup, Descendents, Alkaline Trio. Punk one night, power-pop the next. That range is the whole point.

Because here's what FIVE actually fixed. For a decade, Jacksonville's live-music math had a hole in the middle. You could see a baby band at Jack Rabbits' hundred-cap crucible or a legend at the 1,900-seat Florida Theatre or an arena tour at VyStar — but the mid-size national act, the band too big for a club and too small for a theatre, routinely skipped town for Orlando or Tampa. A ~1,250-cap room run by an operator with Nashville routing muscle plugs exactly that gap. It's the difference between hoping a tour stops here and being on the map by default.

Now FIVE is deep into its first full summer of national bookings, and the calendar reads like a room finding its confidence — including Saturday's Frank Foster and Creed Fisher outlaw-country doubleheader, a bill that would've bypassed Jacksonville entirely a couple of years ago.

But the bigger story is the neighborhood. Five Points has always had the ingredients of a music district — Rain Dogs down the block trading on its Tom Waits-dive soul, record shops, cheap beer, the kind of walkable grit that scenes actually grow in. What it lacked was an anchor: a marquee room big enough to pull touring acts and, with them, the pre-show dinner crowds and post-show stragglers that keep a district's lights on. A restored 1927 movie palace turns out to be a very good anchor.

Preservation purists sometimes fret that a historic theater reborn as a rock room loses something. Stand in that old projection-booth loft during a sold-out show, though, and the argument evaporates. The building was built to gather Jacksonville in the dark and give it something loud and larger than life. Ninety-nine years later, with the amps humming where the film projectors used to whir, it's finally doing that again.

Five Points is a music district again. It just took the right building remembering what it was for.

Sources: FIVE (music venue) — Wikipedia); Music returning to Five Points with FIVE — Jax Daily Record; Historic Riverside Theater now thrives as modern music venue — News4Jax