Concern is growing about the future of Houston’s historic Garden Oaks Theater, which most recently housed a church and was sold late last year to an investment fund.

Grace Church sold the nearly 80-year-old theater in Independence Heights for $7.1 million in October to Heights Investment Fund, according to Harris County property records. The theater, built in 1947, has no protections against demolition and is now empty, according to video reviewed by the Chronicle.

The building’s vertical lettering and marquee entrance have remained in tact for decades on North Shepherd Drive, even through its run as a church during much of the 2000s. Grace Church opened there in 2008.

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“This building, standing since 1947, has been more than a place – it’s been home to countless moments where lives were changed, and God’s presence was felt,” the church wrote on Facebook last fall when the sale was announced.

But two preservationists are worried about the property’s possible demolition, especially after two historic cinemas – the Granada Theater in Houston and Capitan Theater in Pasadena – were razed last year. Houston protects nearly 200 landmarks from demolition, but the Garden Oaks Theater is not one of them, according to the city’s website.

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The Chronicle has been unable to verify the nature of the plans for the Garden Oaks Theater’s future. Neither Grace Church nor Heights Investment immediately responded to requests for comment.

Maureen McNamara, who founded a nonprofit that pushed to revive the River Oaks Theatre after it closed in 2021, plans to ask the public to urge Mayor John Whitmire’s office to stop any demolition plans. She wants Whitmire’s office to ask the new owners to either sell the property or lease it as a community arts theater.

“Strip centers don’t give a city a soul, but special spaces like the River Oaks or the Garden Oaks, those places do and could continue to for years to come,” she said.

A spokesperson’s for Whitmire’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As the River Oaks Theatre prepared to close in 2021, McNamara founded Friends of River Oaks Theatre to advocate for its preservation. The theatre reopened in 2024, and she has since expanded the organization under the name Arthouse Houston to support spaces for cinema throughout the city.

Now she wants to make sure the Garden Oaks Theater, designed by the same architects, stays alive.

She visited the Garden Oaks Theater with descendants of its original owner Friday night and said the theater has been stripped of its seating and metal railings that had run along a wrapped staircase. But aside from asbestos throughout the building, which McNamara said isn’t uncommon for such an old facility, the former theater is still in good condition, she said.

The lobby’s terrazzo floors, decorated with golden swirls, and the murals on the building’s ceiling were still in “great shape,” she said.

Preservation is a ‘no-brainer’

“It seems like a no-brainer that the Garden Oaks could – if historically renovated with care and brought back to be a thriving part of that property – that it could actually serve a larger project, a larger redevelopment project on that block very well,” she said. “It could be a serious draw.”

The Garden Oaks Theater was one of several neighborhood cinemas built in Houston between the 1930s and 1950s, according to David Welling, the author of Cinema Houston, a book about the city’s movie theater history. He said the theater deserves a chance to become a newly renovated entertainment venue like the Heights Theater, the Majestic Metro downtown, and other projects in Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.

Two other historic movie theaters in the Houston area continue to live on as grocery stores – the Trader Joe’s in Upper Kirby and the Whole Foods in West University Place. But until preservation plans take shape, Welling shares McNamara’s concern about the Garden Oaks Theater’s uncertain fate.

“Seeing another classic theater being torn down without even being given a chance to become something else is very disheartening,” he said.

This article originally published at Preservationists fear for the future of Houston’s Garden Oaks Theater months after it was sold.