Majestic Theater

About 1915: Jesse Jones, Houston’s premier urban developer in the early 20th century, built the Chronicle Building in 1910 at Travis Street and Texas Avenue to house the Houston Chronicle. The newspaper was owned by Marcellus Foster, who took his Spindletop windfall profits to embark on a publishing career, and Jones enabled this enterprise for a half-share in the business without becoming involved in the day-to-day operations. Jones built the adjacent 1500 seat theatre building as a vaudeville space and cinema, and chartered management to Karl Hoblitzelle’s Interstate Theatres. Hoblitzelle had opened a smaller theatre called The Majestic on Congress Avenue in 1905, and when Jones’ theatre became available to him, he closed the Congress Avenue space and took the name to the Texas Avenue venue. In 1919 Jones built the 6-story Milam Building on the remaining corner at Milam and Texas. Within a few years an extension was added to the Milam Building with another four floors including a wing above the roof of the theatre. In 1923 Hoblitzelle opened a theatre on Rusk which he named The Majestic and the Texas Avenue theatre was renamed The Palace hosting live performances. Renamed The Zoe in 1937 it showed western movies, and later foreign films, and after 1945 as the Nuevo Palacio, Spanish-language film. In 1946 it closed permanently and the building structure was incorporated into newspaper operations. In 1967 the entire façade on Texas was cladded in white marble, unifying the disparate buildings.

21 January 2017: When the Chronicle bought out the Houston Post’s assets in 1995, Chronicle operations were moved to the Post’s printing facilities building at 4747 Southwest Freeway, and the Texas Avenue Building was emptied of personnel by 2016. The building was demolished piecemeal from the top down in 2017. In the process the hollowed-out bones of the Majestic were briefly revealed before their final disintegration. For a short time the site was a surface-level parking lot, but in 2018 construction began on the Texas Tower building, a 47 story glass tower to be competed in 2021 on the block encompassed by Texas, Milam, Travis and Prairie streets. The building in the background is Aris at Market Square, a 32 story apartment building completed a few months after this image in 2017. At right is The Rice Lofts, an apartment building renovated in 1997 from the unoccupied Rice Hotel, 17 floors, 1912, the third wing on Travis seen here was added in 1925 and an 18th floor added in 1951.