Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
The Alameda Theater has been closed for decades, but now it’s ever-so-slowly coming back to life.
A tour group gathered at the bench on the Houston Street Bridge over the San Pedro Creek Culture Park to enter what was once the nation's largest theater dedicated to Spanish language films and performing arts.
“Once upon a time, there was a city divided by a creek, and its name was San Antonio,” Brent Salter of Amigo Walking Tours told the group.
San Pedro Creek was a very unofficial line of demarcation in the city, with the Majestic and Aztec theaters built in the 1920s to the east, and Anglo shopping and dining thereabouts. The Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s spurred mass migration to Texas, tipping culture and commerce to San Antonio’s lesser developed West Side.
One man in particular had a vision to tap that imbalance.
“The Alameda Theater was the dream of a man named Gaetano Lucchese, who was from an Italian family that was transplanted into the West Side of San Antonio,” Salter explained.
That’s the Lucchese who started the Lucchese Boot Company. In previous years, Lucchese had already built a pair of very successful Spanish language theaters in town. But he decided to build another. He wanted it to be an architectural landmark — something to compete with the Majestic and the Aztec — in an architectural style called Streamline Moderne.
“Streamline Moderne is the architecture style of the Alameda Theater, and it was designed by a man named in N. Straus Nayfach who said, ‘I don't believe in architecture that's imposing and scary,’” Salter added.
Bank and courthouse architecture by design can make someone feel small.
“N. Straus Nayfach said, ‘that's the wrong idea. We should flip that. You should design spaces where people feel welcomed,’” he said. “The result is that there's hardly a right angle anywhere in the structure. It is flowing. It is moving. It's organic.”
The first thing anyone saw from the Alameda was its 86-foot tall marquee.
“So instead of using neon lights, he uses cold cathode lighting on the signs, which shines four times as bright as neon,” Salter said.
So in the fight for theatrical legitimacy, Lucchese was punching the right buttons. But the Alameda’s unexpected curiosities don't end with unusual architecture and bold exterior lighting.
“From its inception, it was described as a foreign trade center between San Antonio and Spanish language countries,” he said. “So on the exterior, you had 88 offices that held the Mexican consulate for eight years ... along with offices representing 23 other Spanish language countries.”
Even though it was a place for Spanish-speaking movies and stage entertainment, it was also a place that could help people plan a vacation to Nicaragua or Chile. All that, plus a 2,500-seat theater.
Opening night was in March 1949. Lucchese’s opera-singing sister Josephine sang the national anthem, followed by the singing cowboy Gene Autry. And that was followed by a movie.
“They also had variedades taking place here. That's like a vaudeville, a variety show that would be going on the stage, and these shows included Antonio Aguilar, who rode out on his horse and would perform for the crowd completely thrilled to see a horse in a theater,” he said.
Salter led his visitors through the theater itself. The blue walls at left and right contained breathtaking murals.
“And the murals under natural light are beautiful in their concept, and you can tell that there was artistry invested in them. But when you put black light on those murals, they jump out at you,” Salter said.
“And every time on a tour that we get to that portion, people just gasp, and they take out their phones, and they're so excited to see that again,” he said. “And I think that's exactly the same excitement that took place on March 9, 1949, when the theater premiered. The lights go dark, and the black lights turn on, and the crowd gasps. You still have that reaction today.”
Dixie Watkins was on the tour as well.
“There was more than just a special appeal to the black light murals on either side of the theater. Those just absolutely blew me away,” Watkins said. “And the depiction of history, you know, sort of the Anglo evolutionary side of San Antonio on one side and the [Latino] indigenous on the other was that was really cool."
In fact, the east wall shows the history of San Antonio from the settler’s viewpoint, and the west wall shows the Americas from the indigenous standpoint.
Watkins said the tour was for him a minor revelation: “Absolutely amazing. I've never been inside the Alameda,” he said. “I've only seen it from the outside with Jesse Trevino’s paintings, and it exceeded my expectations, even though it's long in the tooth.”
Salter said he imagines being there when it was brand new, a place that was family friendly and cutting edge.
“In San Antonio, imagine how thrilled they were to sit here in such a movie palace designed for them with Spanish language in front of them, and y'all, this is the first major theater in San Antonio to be desegregated,” Salter said. “It was built to be from day one — not a segregated space — but one where you could sit wherever you pleased in this theater.”
The city continues to work off and on, as funds become available, to restore the Alameda. Salter said the most recent update he received from the city regarding the opening date was late next year.
Amigo Walking Tours will offer these tours through Memorial Day.
