Discussions of downtown Corpus Christi’s building boom in the 1920s usually focus on the industry brought to town with the opening of the port, but with those employees came the need for leisure. One of the favorite pastimes as the population boomed from 10,522 in 1920 to 108,287 by 1950 was a trip to the movies. The R&R theater company opened Texas’s fourth largest movie theatre, the Palace, in 1926. The theater’s original décor included hand-painted mural scenes of South Pacific islands, and Dave Levy provided music on the pipe organ.
Movies played at the Palace in its first few years were silent—the 1920s saw talking movies become more popular, and the theater added sound in 1928 to modernize the experience. When R&R’s lease was renewed after 20 years in 1946, the company completely changed the theater’s decor to a starkly different, streamlined modern look. Gone was the Mission Revival architecture featured above.
The Palace was popular right until its very untimely end. It wasn’t neglect or a hurricane that took it out the night of Dec. 3, 1953; it was a fire. In 1957, a young man arrested on an unrelated charge confessed to being one of the kids who was in the theater’s attic when a piece of paper on fire being used to see in the dark was dropped. The Palace’s time came to an end when the mistakes of those few caused it to literally go up in smoke—as it was damaged beyond repair.
