"I fell in love with Kensington, the neighborhood," Tom Frenkel says. "I fell in love with the piece of real estate, and through the talented architects I work with and thinking about it an awful lot, I figured out what to do with it."
Frenkel is the founder and CEO of Clayton Companies, and in 2022 he bought the building that most of Kensington still calls the Ken. The single-screen theater on Adams Avenue closed in March 2020, after Landmark Theatres decided it could no longer make the economics of an art house cinema work. For a while, the marquee that had advertised foreign films and midnight showings of Rocky Horror simply read "now closed." Somewhere in the two years the building sat empty, a different idea surfaced: turn the property into a multi-story mixed-use complex. Neighbors pushed back hard enough over parking and the loss of the block's low-slung character that the plan never went anywhere.
That failed proposal matters more than a footnote. It set the terms for what came next, and what came next is not a theater. It's not a mixed-use tower either. It's eight to ten small business suites, built inside the old auditorium, under a marquee that will keep reading "The Ken" long after the last movie has played there.
What the First Fight Actually Decided
It's easy to read the mixed-use pushback as simple nostalgia, a neighborhood refusing to let go of its movie theater. That's not quite what happened. The Ken had already been dark for two years by the time the multi-story proposal came up. Nobody was fighting to bring the cinema back. They were fighting the scale of what would replace it.
That distinction shows up again once Frenkel's plan takes shape. The building keeps its footprint. The marquee stays. The ticket booth stays. Inside, a mezzanine adds a second story of suites in the space closest to where the screen used to hang, and Frenkel is adding an entrance on the building's west side so all the future tenants have their own access. None of that requires a taller building or a bigger parking demand. It requires the same box, subdivided differently.
Frenkel has said he expects many of those suites to be rented by people who already live in Kensington, and that he plans to price them competitively with other creative office space in the city, according to reporting from the San Diego Business Journal. As of that reporting, no tenants had been publicly named. What the building becomes next, storefront by storefront, is still being decided.
The Streetlamps Did This First
Kensington has been here before, and it's worth knowing the precedent, because it explains why the Ken outcome isn't surprising once you understand the neighborhood's pattern.
The original 1926 streetlamps that still line Kensington's residential blocks were part of the same early master plan that gave the neighborhood its Spanish Revival houses and arched doorways. At some point the city wanted to swap them out for modern fixtures. Residents formed a maintenance assessment district instead, an arrangement where property owners pay directly to keep the old lamps standing and lit rather than let the city replace them with something more efficient and more generic.
That's the same instinct that killed the mixed-use tower. Given a choice between an upgrade that would have been easier to build and a smaller, odder, more specific version of what was already there, Kensington has now picked the smaller and odder version twice. The lamps stayed lit on their own dime. The Ken stayed low and stayed subdivided rather than stacked.
What's Actually Going Into the Building
The renovation itself leans hard on preservation, not demolition. Frenkel is working with San Diego-based Element Design Build Inc. and Scottsdale-based Aline Architecture Concepts to restore the property under California's Mills Act, which provides significant property tax relief to owners who commit to maintaining a building's historic character. That's not a cosmetic detail. It's a legal and financial mechanism that only makes sense if the plan is genuinely to keep the old bones rather than gut them for something new.
Inside, the original curved decking that once lined the ceiling above the seats will stay exposed, punctuated by skylights, and some of that same decking will be repurposed as flooring elsewhere in the building. The Ken's original film projector will be mounted on a wall where it once threw light across three hundred seats. Even the lettering is original in spirit if not in material. The Ken's marquee font isn't manufactured anymore, so Frenkel special-ordered reproduction letters from Wagner Letter Company to keep the sign looking the way it always has, just now advertising tenants instead of showtimes.
The Ken was built in the Art Moderne style by architect S. Charles Lee, and it opened as San Diego's first venue to bring foreign films to the city. That history is part of why the building carries the weight it does on Adams Avenue. It's also why a straightforward office conversion, without any of this preservation work, might have drawn the same kind of resistance that killed the tower proposal in the first place.
A Village Built at This Scale Already
None of this happens in isolation from the rest of the block. Adams Avenue is a corridor you handle on foot, not a shopping district you drive to. Blind Lady Ale House sits within walking distance. AMSD Concerts runs an intimate house concert series out of a Spanish-style home in the neighborhood, the kind of venue that only works because it's small on purpose. The Kensington-Normal Heights Library and Kensington Park anchor the residential side of the same walkable loop.
Eight to ten small suites fits that pattern in a way a single large tenant, or a five-story building, would not have. San Diego Association of Realtors data through February 2026 put Kensington's detached home inventory at just 1.8 months, with typically only ten to twenty active listings across detached homes and condos at any given time. That's a market defined by scarcity on the residential side, and the Ken's second act suggests the same instinct extends to how the neighborhood wants its commercial space to fill in too. Small, specific, and occupied by people who already live nearby, rather than large and generic.
Frenkel's own framing backs this up. He's said the outpouring of interest in the suites has come from the community itself, which is a different kind of leasing pipeline than what a developer chasing a national chain would expect. Whether that interest converts into signed leases and a public tenant roster is still an open question. The marquee has read "coming soon" for a while now, and the honest answer is that it may keep reading that way for a bit longer while Frenkel and his team finish deciding who moves in.
What's already settled is the shape of the thing. Kensington didn't get its movie theater back, and nobody was really asking for that. It got a building that stayed the size it always was, filled with the kind of small, local tenants the neighborhood has spent a century organizing itself around, right down to the streetlamps outside.
If you're curious about what's landing in those suites once leases start getting signed, or you want to talk about what a neighborhood like this one, built for walking and organized around scale rather than square footage, means for property values on Adams Avenue and the surrounding streets, reach out to the Jeff Davidson Group. We're paying attention to the Ken too.
