The Marquee Is Back On, and BOO!kley Looks Different This Year

Walk down 12 Mile Road this week and the skeletons are already out. Full-size ones, propped against porch rails and shop windows, some posed mid-stride like they're crossing the street. Berkley residents have seen this before. What they haven't seen before is the marquee above them lit up again, spelling out a name that isn't a movie title for the first time in three decades.

That marquee belongs to the old Berkley Theater, the building on the north side of 12 Mile at Robina that showed its last film, Jurassic Park, in 1993 before spending the next thirty years as a Perry Drugs and then a Rite Aid. The drugstore closed in September 2024 and the space sat empty until Glenn Wilhelm, who owns The Roxy in Rochester, bought the building last fall and spent close to $4 million turning it into a live entertainment venue called The Berkley. It opened this June, later than the spring target Wilhelm had floated, with room for 880 people, a restaurant, a lounge, and a booking calendar that runs from dueling pianos to comedy nights to touring bands.

This is the first BOO!kley season since it opened. That timing matters more than it sounds like it should.

What the building actually changes

Berkley's Downtown Development Authority has run BOO!kley every October for years. It's the same lineup residents already know: month-long skeleton displays on porches and storefronts, a Ghost Chase, a Night Market, Ladies Night Out, a Trick-or-Treat Stroll, and Monster Mash closing things out. None of that changed this year. What changed is what those events are now built around.

For thirty years, the anchor building on that stretch of 12 Mile was a drugstore, then nothing. Every BOO!kley since 1993 has happened in spite of that empty storefront, not because of it. This is the first year the block has a room that holds 880 people and a reason to be there after 9 p.m. Kelly Pettibone, who owns Naka down the street, put it plainly when the renovation was still underway: she was glad to see the space not sitting empty anymore, and she expected it to be good for the neighborhood. Darlene Rothman, who directs the Berkley Chamber of Commerce, went further, telling reporters she expected the surrounding shops and restaurants to benefit directly from the foot traffic a venue that size brings in.

The Chamber's own Pub Crawl, which runs as part of BOO!kley programming, is leaning into the moment with a Stranger Things theme this year, turning local bars into stand-ins for Hawkins for the night. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of programming choice that only makes sense once you have enough venues clustered close enough together to crawl between.

The walkable radius got bigger at almost the same time

The second piece of this is easy to miss because it isn't about a building. It's about a boundary line.

Berkley launched its BOSS district, short for Berkley Outdoor Social Scene, in June 2024. The idea was simple: buy a drink at a participating restaurant, get it in an approved cup, and walk it around a marked section of downtown instead of finishing it at the table. The original footprint covered three restaurants, El Patio Mexican Restaurant, Amici's Kitchen and Living Room, and Mongers' Provisions, which runs as The Rind in the evenings. Zach Berg, who co-owns Mongers' and The Rind, described what the district meant for a business like his at the time.

More people can enjoy our wines. It's not just the people who are able to sit down for dinner. We can widen our table even more.

Slow's Bar BQ Berkley joined the district in 2025. Then in May 2026, the City Council voted to expand the BOSS boundary to cover the majority of downtown, not just the handful of blocks it started with. That vote landed a few weeks before The Berkley's June opening, which means the two changes arrived close enough together that this October is the first one where the walkable drink boundary and the new anchor venue actually overlap on a map.

Mike McGuinness, the DDA's executive director, has been careful about how the district gets described, noting that Berkley's downtown sees minimal incidents and that the goal isn't to add to that. The boundary still closes at 10 p.m. and drinks still have to stay within the marked area. But for a resident heading to a show at The Berkley this month, it means the option to grab something from a participating spot beforehand and carry it most of the way there now actually exists, where a year ago it wouldn't have.

Reading the corner as one block instead of two stories

Take those two facts separately and they're pleasant local news. A theater reopened. A drink district got bigger. Put them on the same timeline and they describe something more specific: this is the first BOO!kley where the corner of 12 Mile and Robina functions as one continuous stretch instead of two things that happen to sit near each other.

Last October, the marquee was dark and the social district stopped short of that end of downtown. Residents still did BOO!kley the way they always have, decorating porches for the neighborhood's boneyard program, showing up for the Ghost Chase, closing out the month with Monster Mash. But the corner anchoring the whole strip was an empty storefront with a preserved sign on top of it, more landmark than destination.

This year the sign works again. Wilhelm was explicit about keeping it that way, telling The Detroit News that the marquee is an iconic part of downtown Berkley's identity and that construction wouldn't touch its structure, aside from a possible switch to LED lighting. Berkley Mayor Bridget Dean has said she expects the venue to draw people who've never been to Berkley before, or who haven't been back in years, and give them a reason to return. Whether that plays out at the scale she's hoping for is still an open question four months into the venue's first season. What isn't in question is that BOO!kley this year has an anchor it didn't have during any previous run of the event, and a wider stretch of sidewalk where a drink from Mongers' or El Patio can travel with you toward it.

For residents who've watched that building sit empty since the Rite Aid closed, the difference shows up in something as small as which way people are walking after dark. A marquee that's been dark for three decades is lit again, and this is the first October it gets to prove what that's worth.

If you're curious how a shift like this tends to ripple into what a home near downtown Berkley is worth, or just want a local read on the corridor before your own plans change, Tom Holzer Homes is always happy to talk through what's actually happening on the ground in Berkley.