Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Florida heard its first talking picture in this building in 1927; now the same walls carry touring rock at 1,250 capacity. FIVE, at 1028 Park Street in Jacksonville's Five Points district, is the 2025 rebirth of the historic Riverside Theater - later the 5 Points Theatre and Sun-Ray Cinema - a room that has cycled through nearly a century of entertainment lives in the heart of the Riverside-Avondale neighbourhood. The theatre opened in March 1927 as the first in Florida equipped for talkies, and its 1949 remodel added the vintage marquee that still juts over Park Street. Decades as a movie house gave way to a playhouse era in the 1980s, the Club 5 nightclub through the 1990s, and a beloved run as the Sun-Ray Cinema indie movie house until its closure - each era layering the building with local memory. Marathon Live, the Nashville-based venue operator, renovated the building and reopened it as FIVE in May 2025, preserving the facade and much of the historic interior while adding modern sound and lighting, an expanded balcony, upgraded restrooms and a VIP loft built into the old projection booth. The tiered main floor and mezzanine give clean sightlines from anywhere in the standing-room house. Booking arrived at full speed: BoyWithUke launched the room on 13 May 2025, and the first seasons brought Descendents, Alkaline Trio, Turnover, Bowling for Soup, Aly and AJ and Kameron Marlowe - a mid-size touring tier Jacksonville had been losing to Orlando and St. Augustine. Tickets sell through Ticketweb, the Friday box office, or Tiger Records on Stockton Street, the venue's official off-site outlet. The Five Points setting is half the appeal - a walkable knot of bars, vintage shops and restaurants at Jacksonville's bohemian crossroads. Parking nearby is tight, so the venue itself urges rideshare, with a designated pickup zone at the door; the room is cashless throughout. For a city rebuilding its live-music infrastructure, FIVE is the anchor tenant.