AUSTIN, Texas — Many people probably take the view at the intersection of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street for granted. But turn the clock back to around 125 years ago and you’d be looking at the very heart of Austin’s most lavish entertainment venue: The city’s first movie theater.
Opened in 1896, the Hancock Opera House mainly offered live stage productions. It’s said the theater that staged the story of Ben Hur using six live horses and a chariot race on stage!
But it was the early Edison Vitagraph movies that drew the curious to the Hancock to view early, short film clips made by Thomas Edison’s photographers.
The Hancock was transformed into a full-time movie theater in 1935 and was renamed The Capitol, where it showed movies until 1963. Despite efforts by preservationists to save it, it was demolished in 1968.
The first theater to play movies exclusively was The Crescent Theater, located at 920 Congress Ave. It first opened in 1913.
Austin’s first true movie palace opened in 1915, named The Majestic, and it lived up to its name with a lavish interior and seating for 1,300.
And although many early Austin movie houses have come and gone, The Majestic is still with us, now known as The Paramount Theatre - a true jewel of theater that has offered generations of Austinites live shows and classic movies.
Legend has it that the Paramount is haunted by ghosts. Some years ago, a pianist visiting the theater snapped a picture of what appeared to be a ghostly figure – a woman – near a balcony door.
“What we believe the history is, is that next to the Paramount Theatre originally was the War Department of the Republic of Texas,” Jim Britt, the Paramount director, said in a 2019 interview with KVUE. “And the belief is that her husband had been a soldier who was missing and that she is constantly trying to get back over to the war department to find out the fate of her husband.”
Britt says the mysterious woman is one of several ghosts that haunt the Paramount. And like all ghost stories, they are hard to prove, but just part of the history – and legends – of Austin’s remarkable old theaters.