The Texas Theatre: Where History Walked In Without Paying

In the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, the Texas Theatre has been showing films since nineteen thirty-one, but the ninety-minute span that cemented its place in history had nothing to do with anything on screen.

The building opened on April twenty-first, nineteen thirty-one, financed in part by the aviator and film producer Howard Hughes. Its nine hundred twenty seats and Art Deco facade served Oak Cliff audiences through the Depression, through the war years, through the suburban exodus that hollowed out neighborhood theaters across the country. By nineteen sixty-three it was an ordinary Friday afternoon movie house, running a war film called War Is Hell.

On November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three, about eighty minutes after President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza, a shoe store employee named Johnny Brewer noticed a young man slip into the theater through the entrance doors without buying a ticket, apparently hiding from the police cars whose sirens were audible on Jefferson Boulevard. Brewer alerted the box office manager, who called the Dallas Police. Within minutes, officers flooded the theater. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the balcony, reportedly shouting this is it and attempting to draw a pistol before being subdued by officers including Nick McDonald. Oswald had also shot and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit less than an hour earlier, just blocks away.

Oswald's seat was confiscated as evidence and never returned. Every owner since has maintained a marker on the replacement seat occupying that row. The theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand three and was fully restored and reopened in two thousand ten.

Today the Texas Theatre operates as an independent cinema and community venue, programming revival screenings, live events, and the kind of eclectic calendar that the most resilient neighborhood theaters tend to cultivate. The seat is still marked.