There had been interest before; offers, even, usually from developers waving heavy checks, hoping to bulldoze history and replace it with a high-rise. To which, time and again, the couple said no.
“They just wanted the dirt,” Mike Schoder said of those on-and-off-again offers as he sat alongside his partner of 25 years, Julia Garton, at the long dining room table of their big, bright home near the shores of White Rock Lake. “They wanted to scrape everything.”
And the couple wanted to hold on to that everything for as long as they could. Or, at least, until that perfect offer came along, which didn’t seem possible until it did, about a year ago. Which is why the couple is sitting at this table for this interview, trying to hold it together.
In what will come as surprising news — heartbreaking to many — the couple is selling the 80-year-old Granada Theater on Greenville Avenue to two men from New York City who will convert it into the first Dallas offshoot of a company called Bathhouse, which is precisely what it sounds like. The Granada’s stage will give way to saunas and steam rooms; its bar, to thermal pools.
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The sun will also set on Sundown at Granada, the oft-crowded next-door restaurant Schoder and Garton opened 14 years ago. The theater’s facade and marquee and most of its exterior will remain. But, come spring, no more shows. Just a “head to toe glow.”
“I’ve had tons of tears,” Garton said, her eyes rimmed with red. She turned to look at Schoder, smiled. “He’s been a lot stronger about it.” He said something about how only now did it feel … a pause. “Real.”
Mike Schoder and Julia Garton said they rejected numerous offers to buy the Granada Theater, but the Bathhouse offer was from the right people at the right time.
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
The last concert is scheduled for April 17. Which is an absolutely impossible thing to fathom to anyone who was there the night Bob Dylan played the Granada. Or Dolly Parton. Or Tom Jones. Or Willie Nelson. Or Adele. Or Wilco or Tame Impala or X or Kacey Musgraves or the Old 97’s. Or — for me, anyway — those Dallas Observer Music Awards we held there a long time ago. Or that Saturday afternoon in 2005 when I sat my toddler son on my shoulders for a Sorta set.
Thousands of performers, locally beloved and internationally renowned, have played the old movie house since the couple bought it in 2004, when they still owned CD World just up Greenville Avenue. Countless people saw their favorite bands at the Granada. Went deaf at the Granada. Fell in love beneath those murals at the Granada.
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“We’ve grown old in that building,” Schoder said. Garton laughed. And getting old there no longer appealed to them. They never had kids. They considered the theater their child. And they’re ready to be empty-nesters while they still have time to see more than a stretch of Greenville Avenue.
Parting with their kid now, they say again and again, was a difficult decision, after so much time, money and emotion invested, including a renovation during the pandemic summer of 2020 that restored the murals and lobby bar. But it was the right offer that came at the right time, which is to say, before it was too late.
Sitting at that table for two hours, the couple had no shortage of reasons for selling at this moment and to this company. COVID came up a lot, and how the sudden, prolonged shutdown only underscored the precarious nature of the live music and restaurant businesses. Costs, too, have shot up in recent years, Schoder said — “the costs of labor, of insurance, of goods.” Of everything, basically.
The Granada Theater has been many things during its 80 years on Greenville Avenue: a first-run movie house, a church, a porn theater and a live-music venue. By 2028, it will become a high-end spa from the owners of New York-based Bathhouse. Sundown at Granada, at the bottom right, will be razed to expand the building for its new use.
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
“Part of it is that, and part of it is also that when you wake up every single morning and you’re responsible for over a hundred employees and what broke five minutes before doors opened, phones ringing at midnight about band settlements, the alarm going off at 3 in the morning,” Schoder said. “These are the kind of things that over time I think we’ve had to just look deep inside and determine that it’s a lot of factors.
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“We also own two acres of land in the middle of Dallas, and we’ve been approached for a long time — ever since we’ve had it, really. Our main focus was to try to find someone else to do what we do.”
But they couldn’t. Probably because of all the risks and reasons Schoder had already listed. And because all the concerts that might otherwise have gone to the Granada after April will have no trouble finding homes at the Kessler Theater, the Echo Lounge, Trees, Canton Hall, the Majestic Theater, House of Blues, the Rustic, Legacy Hall in Plano … you get the point.
Schoder mentioned that he’d held on to CD World for way too long, until long past the moment the world had decided to stream its music rather than hold it. He opened it in 1992 at the age of 24, in a storefront that felt more like a clubhouse than a retailer, and when he finally sold it in 2008, he did it for pennies on the dollar, by carting off all that back stock to Half Price Books for around a dime a disc.
Dolly Parton performed to a sold-out crowd at the Granada Theater on Aug. 3, 2002, two years before Mike Schoder and Julia Garton bought the venue.
Conrad Schmidt/Dallas Morning News
“That was devastating,” Schoder said. “Living through that is part of why, maybe, I’m a little less reckless. Maybe there’s a little more wisdom in my decision than my decision with CD World.”
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While he and Garton were weighing their venue’s future, Travis Talmadge and Jason Goodman were looking to expand their booming Bathhouse business, which began in 2019 with a location in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, followed by two more New York spots and coming-soons in Philadelphia (in a recently renovated 1904 hotel), Los Angeles (in the former Amoeba Music building on Sunset Boulevard) and Chicago. A 2025 Forbes profile of the pair ran beneath the headline: “Bathhouse is Changing the Face of Wellness Across America.”
Talmadge said this week that Dallas was always on the expansion list, because of the “the history, the density and a market full of people who want to have experiences.” They looked in Knox-Henderson, the West Village, Uptown and along Greenville, with the Granada finally appearing on his radar about a year ago after a local broker suggested it could be had for the right price — and the right concept. So he came to Dallas, met Schoder, toured the building and eventually made the deal, which involves razing Sundown, expanding the existing Granada building but leaving its exterior unchanged when it reopens in mid-2028.
Bathhouse’s owners say the exterior of the Granada will remain the same and that spa-goers will still enter the venue beneath the marquee that’s illuminated Greenville Avenue since January 1946.
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
“You will enter Bathhouse the same way you’d enter the Granada, under the marquee,” Talmadge said. “From there, it will feel like a very different experience.”
Which, you could say, has been the Granada’s history all along: It opened in January 1946 with the movie Mildred Pierce and, over time, hosted church services and football game watch parties and screened golden-age oldies and art-house offerings. By the mid-1970s, it became what the Dallas Times Herald called “the most controversial theater in the history of Dallas” when it began screening “X-rated porno films.”
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The Granada first hosted live music in May 1977, taking a gamble with Kenny Rogers that didn’t pay off. For a short time, the theater went dark, and there was good reason to believe it would go the way of the Wilshire on Mockingbird Lane and the Esquire on Oak Lawn Avenue — into the landfill. It changed hands like a baseball card for decades until Schoder and Garton bought it in 2004.
Rhett Miller and the Old 97’s, seen here at the Granada on Nov. 22, 2014, are longtime favorites at the Greenville Avenue venue. Miller returns Nov. 1 for the annual Breathe Easy Concert Benefiting the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Jerry McClure/Dallas Morning News
Within two years, the Granada began racking up Dallas Observer Music Awards as this town’s best live music venue. I was at the weekly back then, and we held more than a few awards shows there. Because, as we noted in 2007, the Granada was run by “laid-back folks who truly care about music — be it local or national, jam band or experimental freak-out jazz — and their cool vibe can be felt throughout the venue’s charmingly fading walls, ornate ceiling and chill-out balcony.”
It’s strange to re-read that 19-year-old blurb now. Because as then-Observer music editor Jonanna Widner wrote, under Schoder’s ownership, “We don’t have to worry: No one’s gonna tear this sucker down and turn it into a bunch of condos. Not on his watch.”
And that could have happened. Easily. The parking lot behind the Granada is zoned for multi-family, which was strong bait for circling developers. But Schoder and Garton said that was never going to happen.
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This photo of Mike Schoder was taken in August 2004, after he and Julia Garton bought the Granada Theater. Schoder was still four years away from selling CD World, just up Greenville Avenue.
Michael Ainsworth/Dallas Morning News
“Julia and I really believe in health and wellness,” Schoder said when asked why they decided to sell to Bathhouse. Far as they figure, it’s just the next step in the theater’s evolution — “a different drawing card,” as Schoder put it, where “you’re going to hang out with people of like minds, people that want to get healthy, people that want to relax. And that’s as close as I could ever imagine it being to something that we would be elated about.”
Schoder began telling some senior staffers this week about the sale. He said they’re taking it well, that they understand why he’d want to quit the grind and see the world. Some wondered what took them so long. That doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s just an incredibly hard thing for us to let go of,” Schoder said over that dining room table. “But I will never, ever say that I did not have the time of my life.”