The closing of the Varsity Theater has to come as terribly sad news for anyone who has lived here for any appreciable amount of time. Sad, but hardly surprising.

For the first time in just shy of a century, downtown Chapel Hill is without a movie theater. The first one, the original Pickwick, appears to have started showing newfangled moving pictures in 1911.

There's been a movie theater in the Varsity space since 1927, when Calvin Coolidge was president, the first transatlantic phone call was made and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. Admission was 30 cents for adults, a dime for kids. It was originally called the Carolina Theater, which moved across Franklin Street in 1942, and then the Village Theater before assuming its identity as the Varsity.

Your memories of the Varsity will depend on your era. Lines of people waiting to get in for popular shows have been a familiar Franklin Street sight for decades. During the 1970s, the late night showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" at the Varsity was a weekly event for what seemed like years; people would dress in costume, dance to the Time Warp and squirt squirt guns during the opening rain sequence.

It was a small, architecturally quirky motion picture theater, what with its narrow entrance corridor, tiny lobby, and bathrooms and a sort of lounge up at the top of a flight of stairs. The Varsity had sensational popcorn, when the machine wasn't broken.

Sadly, we live in an age now when small, architecturally quirky motion picture theaters are a dwindling breed. The rise of the multiplex, the DVD player and the Internet have all taken a toll.

Given that, Varsity owner Bruce Stone said, perhaps the community simply isn't equipped to support two art house theaters -- the Varsity and the three-screen Chelsea, which he also owns, in Timberlyne Shopping Center: "Does Chapel Hill need FIVE screens of specialty films, when three, at say the Chelsea, might be more than enough."

Stone also said that in addition to increasingly difficult industry-wide conditions, factors specific to the Varsity's location made it hard to keep it going.

Potential patrons, he said, were put off by the difficulty and expense of parking and, as he delicately put it, "by the street life, and even by the odors and objects that decorate the downtown walkways."

That's a familiar litany of woes downtown, which now has neither a movie theater nor a general audience bookstore.

Losing the Varsity is a setback to Chapel Hill's efforts to revitalize Franklin Street. It's hard to imagine Franklin Street without that classic marquee over the sidewalk, and people now have one fewer reason to go downtown.

Not that long ago there were no less than three theaters downtown, with something like six or seven screens. Now, not a one.

There's no telling yet whether or when downtown Chapel Hill might ever get another movie theater. But without one, it's a less colorful place.