Earlier this year, the Crunch gym in Friendship Heights announced it was going to close, and longtime patrons—who considered it an important community hub—were distraught. Homemade protest signs appeared in front of the Wisconsin Avenue entrance (“more than a gym!”). A grassroots group forme d. Crunch shut down anyway, leaving members without their longtime hangout and the building’s owner, Donohoe, with almost 18,000 square feet of vacant space to rent. But for many longtime residents, it’s the sad end of a different business in that space that hurts the most. The Cinema theater, which occupied the building from 1965 to 2005, had a huge single screen and 826 seats. It was a major destination for upper Northwest’s movie lovers, whether they were scandalized by The Graduate in the 1960s, freaking out over The Exorcist in the 1970s, or, like me, lining up for repeat-watches such as E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in the 1980s and beyond. With the Crunch sign now removed and the gym equipment all trucked out, the ghost of the Cinema feels more present than it has in decades. Recently, I met up at the vacant space with David Burka, whose family co-owned the local K-B movie-theater chain that opened the Cinema. Now 84, Burka was in his early twenties back then, freshly married and working for a CPA firm. His dad, Fred, was the co-owner of K-B. One day, the company’s bookkeeper had a heart attack while eating lunch at the Peoples drugstore in Spring Valley. “I knew accounting, so my father offered me the job,” Burka recalls. “So that’s how I got into the movie business.” As Burka wandered around the shell of the old theater, memories started to flow. Over here was the box office, where Burka created a more modern ticketing system. Over there was the projection booth, where he occasionally filled in for a no-show. Burka said he had no recollection of the opening-night film, an Italian comedy called White Voices. “A truly dismal clinker,” the Washington Post wrote. But the paper loved the theater itself, “an elegant new film boite” with a lush red interior and impressive sound. Burka left the movie business in 1980 and started a real-estate management firm. The K-B company—which also owned prominent theaters like the Apex, the MacArthur, the Baronet, and the Ontario—shuttered in 1994. Cineplex Odeon reopened the Cinema a few months later; ads boasted it was the “2nd largest screen in DC!” But the place closed for good about a decade later. The final film: A Very Long Engagement . What will go in there now? Burka didn’t seem keen on a mostly joking suggestion that he revive the K-B chain with new theaters in this space and the also-vacant Uptown in Cleveland Park. But he was happy to spend a bit of time hanging out again at the Cinema. “I mean, it’s sentimental to see it, absolutely,” he said. “I was always sorry that K-B didn’t make it as a chain. Because we had the best theaters in town.” This article appears in the July 2026 issue of Washingtonian.The post The Ghost of a Classic DC Movie Theater first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less