Raze. Reinvent. Repeat.
Iconic block along Westheimer keeps changing with the times in booming Montrose
For better or for worse, neighborhoods change. Especially in Houston, a zoning-averse city that’s quick to tear down and build anew. Fragments of Montrose’s heyday linger today. It was home to a thriving gay community in the 1980s — the core of Houston’s LGBTQ culture and politics. Some of this history remains, notably in the many gay bars dotting Montrose’s corners, but much of it is gone. In recent years, million-dollar house flips, modern townhomes and luxury high-rises have cropped up. There’s a Sweetgreen and a Shake Shack on Westheimer. One of the city’s oldest gay bars, Mary’s, is now Blacksmith, a coffee shop owned by Chris Shepherd.
One building has kept its old façade while cycling through personas: At Westheimer and Yoakum, the former Tower Theatre stands tall on one of the road’s hair-raising bends.
On April 10, New Orleans-based Acme Oyster House opened its new location in the old art deco theater, replacing El Real Tex-Mex Cafe, which closed at the end of 2019.
TAKING DOWN THE OLD, PUTTING UP THE NEW
On Feb. 24, a team of subcontractors hovered at the very top of the building in a boom lift, prying away the large white letters that had towered over Westheimer for a decade — the words “Tex Mex” jutting out like two exclamation points on either side of the red column, a promise of beef fajitas and enchiladas with chili gravy.
The marquee, which used to advertise El Real’s happy hour and lunch specials, read: “Acme Oyster House Coming 2021.”
A month later, a 4-foot-tall neon A appeared, followed by a C, an M and an E. Then came a tall gap: The A was placed too high, leaving an awkward space between “Acme” and the “Oyster House” lettering above the marquee. The whole centerpiece needed to be redone. So go the typical woes of construction work.
Around the corner, the wall facing the parking lot was painted bright red, a mural of the restaurant’s name in its very early stages; just a lone white “C” and “M” above a “TER HO.”
Inside, staff members attended a training session in the kitchen. The rest of the construction crew buzzed around various projects as the space began to look like a dining room.
A HOMECOMING OF SORTS
Mark Klaybor, a salesman and neon specialist, was lining an arch above the future raw bar with parchment, preparing to affix Acme’s signature “Oysters” sign.
He lives in New Orleans and has been building Acme Oyster House’s neon signs for 22 years. This is his second trip to Houston for the new project, but Klaybor is no stranger to the Bayou City. He lived on 17th in the Heights, in an old house with no air conditioning, as a 20-something between 1978 and 1984.
“I don’t know how I did it,” he laughed, sitting outside his hotel drinking a beer after a long day at the construction site. “It’s a really nice house now. I went by to look at it.”
One of his first jobs in Houston was as a bartender at Fitzgerald’s, a Heights music venue that operated for 42 years until it closed in 2018. It’s now a Laz parking lot. There was a lot of live music in both the Heights and Montrose around that time, and Klaybor often indulged. One thing he says hasn’t changed about Montrose is it’s mostly a neighborhood of young people hanging out.
THE MANY LIVES OF THE TOWER THEATRE
The Tower Theatre opened in February 1936, showing movies only, with a Valentine’s Day screening of “Barbary Coast” starring Miriam Hopkins. Over the decades, Tower tried to adapt with new technology and enhanced screens, but it closed in August 1978, reopening later that year under new ownership and pivoting to live performances.
Klaybor remembers going to the Tower Theatre two or three times. He saw “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” when it started its off-Broadway circuit in Houston — a big deal at the time. The show, he said, was “just delightful.”
According to the Texas State Historical Association, it was “the first Broadway musical to have an open-ended season in Texas.” In a TV segment published on the Texas Archive of the Moving Image’s website, Houston theatergoers are seen excitedly streaming into Tower to take in the musical. Stage manager Roger Allan Raby said it was the first time a still-running New York show came to a city that was not a traditional theater market like Chicago or Los Angeles.
And it was a roaring success: Unlike in New York, the local audience picked up on all the
Texas jokes.
But the curtain eventually closed on the original Tower Theatre. In December 1988, it reopened as Clubland, a short-lived nightclub and live-music venue chain owned by Chicagobased businessman Steve Jarvis.
Pace Entertainment, a prominent local concert promoter at the time, owned the building and partnered with Enterlink, a Houston nightclub-consulting firm, for Tower’s next chapter: Live music was booked Mondays through Thursdays; Fridays through Sundays it operated as Decadance at the Tower, a disco that had its grand opening in March 1990.
In 1995, the theater became a Hollywood Video rental store, swapping the “Tower” neon lights for “Hollywood” and painting the building in the chain’s signature purple color scheme. The store had a relatively long run, before suffering a Blockbuster-style fate and closing in 2009.
Then the landmark made a bigger pivot — into the food scene. El Real Tex-Mex Cafe opened in 2011, helmed by Bryan Caswell, Bill Floyd and Robb Walsh. The restaurant aimed to bring old-school Tex-Mex fare to Montrose.
It worked. The Houston Chronicle described its enchiladas with chili gravy as “a time warp in a tortilla tube: a cheese-slickened wake-up call to contemporary Tex-Mex enthusiasts who don’t recall the glory days of combo plates, and a chili-stoked blast from the past for old timers who treasure the flavors of what the restaurant calls ‘vintage’ Tex-Mex.”
Many fans were sorry to see El Real abruptly serve its last enchilada in October 2019.
And so, the Tower Theatre lay dormant once again, waiting for its next persona to spring to life.
A TRANSITIONING BLOCK
Meanwhile, the Montrose around the Tower Theatre is transforming, often to the chagrin of longtime locals.
“This area has seen a lot of change over the years, and that change will continue while this center is redeveloped,” Brecah Helm, a manager at the Half Price Books across the street, wrote on a note posted outside the shop, announcing its closure in January. The bookstore’s shell stood vacant, a ghost storefront in an abandoned strip mall — a familiar sight these days. The bright-red letters were removed, revealing beige shadows etched on the gray façade.
It had been the last Half Price Books inside the Loop. On March 29, the entire lot was bulldozed to the ground.
Around the corner on Montrose Boulevard, “Disco Kroger,” so named for its fame as a 24-hour melting pot for Houston’s LGBTQ neighborhood, has been boarded up since November, its parking lot fenced off. A hole has been carved out of its sign, like a giant fist punched through it, leaving just the tippy-tops of the Kroger letters visible. The empty store sits for now, awaiting its fate in the shadow of the Hanover Montrose luxury apartment building.
ENTER: ACME OYSTER HOUSE
The highly anticipated Acme Oyster House is entering new Montrose, but the restaurant’s history stretches back more than 100 years in New Orleans. Acme Café opened on Royal Street in the French Quarter in 1910. After a fire destroyed the building in 1924, it reopened as Acme Oyster House on Iberville Street, where it continues to operate to this day.
It now has five more locations on the Gulf Coast, including its newest outpost on Westheimer.
Every Acme has a raw bar, where oysters are shucked to order, with a red-neon “Oysters” sign arched above it. Houston’s — in the spot of El Real’s former tortilla station — is the biggest one yet.
The patio seats 50 people, who can admire Acme posters in the indents where movie posters were once nestled. French Quarterstyle gas lanterns give the area a Big Easy vibe.
Upstairs in the mezzanine, the Acme team brought over black-and-white Jerry Moran photographs from the New Orleans location: a portrait of jazz musician Lionel Batiste; a close-up of an oyster.
Tucked in a corner that you can easily walk by without noticing is a small, old photograph of Acme in New Orleans, likely from the ’40s or ’50s — right around the time the Tower Theatre was in its heyday.