The Texas Theatre

Once the heart of the southwest Dallas community—a grand, palatial gathering place marked by a brightly lit sign that spelled T-E-X-A-S, touting top-of-the-line acoustics and appurtenances, the Texas Theatre was opened at 231 West Jefferson Boulevard with fanfare on April 21, 1931. The Texas Theatre was the novelty of long time Oak Cliff resident and entrepreneur, C. R. McHenry, better known in the community as “Uncle Mack.” McHenry’s dream was to build a theater with state-of-the-art projection and sound equipment.

McHenry partnered with four Dallas area businessmen to help him realize this dream: Harold B. Robb, E. H. Rowley, (Robb & Rowley Theatres) W. G. Underwood and David Bernbaum. Together they hired renowned architect W. Scott Dunne to design the Texas. The men spared no expense and boasted that the theater was “fireproof”—constructed entirely of concrete. The theater’s opera seating cost $19,000, the projection and sound system cost $12,000, the 1,240 yards of the finest grade carpet cost $5,000, and the Barton organ, the second largest in the City of Dallas, cost $10,000. However, McHenry was most proud of the cooling and ventilation system, which blew 200,000 cubic feet of air per minute through a water-cooled system pumped from a 4,000-gallon tank. The cooling system made “The Texas” the first theater in Dallas with air conditioning. Billionaire film producer and renowned aviator Howard Hughes briefly owned the Robb & Rowley movie theater chain in the early 30′s during construction and opening of the Texas Theatre.

On November 22, 1963 at approximately 1:45 p.m., nearly 15 Dallas police officers converged on the Texas Theatre in search of a man who had entered without paying. That man was Lee Harvey Oswald—President John F. Kennedy’s accused lone assassin.

President Kennedy’s assassination marked a violent end to the Age of Camelot and forever scarred the American psyche. As the Texas Theatre rocketed into the international spotlight, an urgency to hide, deny and destroy it tore its way through Dallas. Shortly thereafter—in what is coined locally among preservationists as the most comprehensive architectural cover-up of the Twentieth Century—the theater’s vibrant designs, false bridges, towers and campaniles, decorative wood railings, and star and cloud painted ceilings were sealed from public view under a spanish style stucco re-design.

As technology in moving, talking, and color pictures progressed and drive-ins and multiplex cinema became the rave, the Texas Theatre’s patrons slowly moved on to other entertainment venues. Failing to capture a considerable audience, United Artists closed the theater in 1989. In an attempt to save it, the Texas Theatre Historical Society (TTHS) bought the theater in 1990. Acknowledging its importance to the President’s assassination, TTHS allowed Oliver Stone to remodel the exterior façade for his 1990 film, JFK. However in 1992, the Society was no longer able to make the mortgage payments and the theater closed once more. Shortly thereafter, former usher and sign changer Don Dubois of Texas Rosewin-Midway Properties saved the theater from the wrecking ball. Nevertheless, two years later in 1995, it was nearly destroyed by a five-alarm fire, forcing the doors shut yet again.

In 1996, Pedro Villa rescued the theater from demolition when he learned of plans to convert it into a furniture warehouse. However, as Villa’s resources were exhausted and his pleas for investments went unheard, the theater defaulted back to Texas Rosewin-Midway Properties. The tattered and torn building remained vacant for three years, succumbing to vandals, stray animals, and hostile weather.

In 2001 The Oak Cliff Foundation purchased the building and began looking for a new permanent tenant. Several areas of the building were renovated and upgraded by the OCF. The Texas Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

On August 31st, 2010, Aviation Cinemas Inc, a company formed by filmmaker and film industry consultant Barak Epstein took over the lease of the Texas Theatre. Epstein enlisted the help of filmmakers Adam Donaghey, Eric Steele and Jason Reimer to begin new cinema and event venue operations at the Texas Theatre

Today in Texas History: Downtown Dallas in flames

On this date in 1860, a fire damaged most of downtown Dallas. The fire began in W.W. Peak Brothers’ drugstore, a popular business and gathering place in the infantile city. The fire quickly spread to other businesses, including a dry-goods store, a grocery, an insurance agency, a boot and shoe shop, brickyards, and saddle shops, ultimately destroying an entire city square.

Early Dallas was located close to the Trinity River

At the time of the fire, the population of Dallas totaled 678 people. The fire devastated the city’s economic health because, Dallas operated as the service center for the surrounding rural communities. The city depended entirely on selling goods. The fire destroyed storefronts, in addition to inventory, thus halting the city’s commercial activity and delaying continued growth.
Many residents of Dallas and others across the state charged that abolitionists and slaves were responsible for the fire. Staunch pro-slavery advocates argued that Northerners had infiltrated the state and were planning to alter the status quo using violent means to reach their chaotic goals and local pro-slavery advocates.
The Dallas Herald reported in 1892 that one local politician acknowledged,  Three slaves were convicted of arson and hanged as punishment and two Iowa preachers were exiled from Dallas.
Historian Michael Phillips accused local pro-Confederate activists of exploiting the fire for political purposes. Philllips wrote in his 1999 piece, “White Violence, Hegemony, and Slave Rebellion in Dallas, Texas, Before the Civil War,” that “Dallas County voted for secession by 76 percent, but it was seven months after the Dallas fire occurred” and that Dallas support for the Southern cause was not inevitable, stating, “The ‘southerness’ of Dallas could be measured by the length of a hangman’s rope.” In 1860, Dallas was an overwhelmingly white city for a growing Southern town. The African American population totaled 97 persons.
Even Sam Houston, who supported slavery, claimed that local officials exploited a series of accidents to conjure support for Southern slavery. Today, some people remain skeptical that a fire occurred, ascribing to conspiracy theories that allege local officials and pro-slave advocates were really in fact responsible. Conspiracy theorists believe that policy makers sought to undermine the appeal of abolitionists in a town with a small black population and strong Western principles of freedom and liberty by staging the fire to join the greater South in leaving the Union.
Dallas eventually recovered from the fire, and was rebuilt in the later part of the decade after the Civil War had ended. The city’s rebuilding was helped partly thanks to its strategic site as the quartermaster, commissary and administrative headquarters for the Confederate Army during the war.
Dallas’ new status as a central point in Texas and in the South, brought new residents and business to the city. Dallas city also experienced no fighting in its boundaries, protecting the city from further economic blight, aiding in the city’s recovery and growth in the post-war era.
Posted by Hillary Sorin on July 8, 2010 at 5:01 am