History

Oak Cliff in 1931 was a middle-class Dallas neighborhood undergoing rapid residential expansion, its Jefferson Boulevard commercial corridor serving the population of single-family houses spreading south and west from the Trinity River crossing at the Houston Street viaduct. W. Scott Dunne designed the Texas Theatre in the Art Deco idiom that chain theaters were deploying across American commercial streets — streamlined geometric ornament, a projecting marquee that read as modern and entertaining from half a block away, and the vertical sign tower that became the standard identifier for the neighborhood cinema. The theater spent its first three decades as a straightforward commercial entertainment venue serving the residential community of Oak Cliff.

That history was altered irrevocably on November 22, 1963. Within an hour and a half of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dealey Plaza, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed approximately one mile from the Texas Theatre. Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been observed entering the theater without paying by a shoe store employee named Johnny Brewer, was confronted inside the auditorium by officers who had surrounded the building. The arrest occurred mid-film; Oswald drew a pistol before being subdued. The event placed the Texas Theatre into every account of that day and of the subsequent decade of American political trauma.

Subsequent decades brought the theater the commercial vicissitudes common to neighborhood cinemas — competition from multiplexes, declining downtown retail, periods of closure and renovation. A community effort in the 2000s and 2010s preserved the building and reestablished it as an operating cinema with cultural programming. The Texas Theatre now screens repertory, independent, and revival films, and presents live events, maintaining its position on Jefferson Boulevard as both a neighborhood cultural anchor and a site of American historical memory.