Being hot rodders, we typically live for days of old. Days when you’d cruise up in your rod, gleaming with pride as you picked up your best girl to head off to the drive-in. Whether or not you actually planned on watching the film projected on that massive screen was beside the point. Drive-in theaters have their roots deeply ingrained in our American hot rodding culture.

At their peak in the late ‘50s, drive-in theaters surpassed 4000 individual locations across the United States. Only a few hundred remain open as an operating theater. Many of them have either been torn down, sit overgrown, dying and decrepit, or have been turned into hubs for swap meets.

It seems, though, there may be a revival nearing. The Roadium drive-in, later known as the Paramount drive-in, situated in Pramount, California has spent its years as an Open Air Market since the reels stopped rolling. Recently Glenn Bianchi, son of the man who originally founded the theater, announced that he intends to bring the theater back to its former glory. With two new 75-foot  wide-screens, state-of-the-art projectors, an improved snack bar and enough room for 800 cars, the Roadium/Paramount drive-in is set to be up and running in early April 2014.

Drive-ins.com states that since the year 2000, there have been 21 re-openings and 25 newly constructed drive-ins in the United States. Associations and groups such as The United Drive-In Theare Owners Association (U.D.I.T.O.A.) and Project Drive-In are pushing to save this iconic pastime. Theaters such as the Delsea drive-In, located in Vineland, New Jersey have reopened with great success. Hopefully the trend continues and the drive-in theater becomes a prominent fixture of our culture once more.