Selena Quintanilla performs at a 1994 fashion show for her clothing line, sold at her Selena, Etc. boutiques in San Antonio and Corpus Christi.
1994©️Al Rendon
A still photo from the “Selena” movie shows how the Terrell Hills location looked during filming. The house on Larchmont Drive stood in for one of similar age and size in Lake Jackson, Texas, where the Quintanilla family lived for about 10 years.
Courtesy Leighton A. Chapman
Selena performs at the San Antonio Spurs “Stay in School Jamboree” in the Alamodome on March 18, 1995. In the “Selena,” movie, fans were invited to pack the Alamodome for filming of a scene of the Tejano star performing in the Astrodome on Feb. 26, 1995, as part of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Express-News file photo
Jennifer Lopez, who played the title character in “Selena,” was in the Astrodome concert scenes filmed at the Alamodome in 1996, where fans of the late Tejano singing star were invited to watch, applaud and take pictures.
1996©️Al Rendon
A house in Terrell Hills, built in 1946, stood in for singer Selena Quintanilla’s childhood home in “Selena,” the 1997 movie about her life. This photo was taken before a recent, extensive remodeling. Like Quintanilla’s actual former home in Lake Jackson, it’s a private residence, not open to the public.
Courtesy Leighton A. Chapman
The Mayan-like statues that graced Karam’s Mexican Restaurant – shown here in 1972 with sculptor Antonio Medina – were featured in the now-closed restaurant’s Mayan Garden. They can be seen in the “Selena” movie, for which Karam’s was one of several San Antonio locations.
San Antonio Light
This 1946 plat map of Terrell Heights, Unit 2, shows Larchmont Drive near the top. It was one of the earliest streets developed for the family-friendly suburb.
Courtesy San Antonio Public Library
In a June 27 column on Terrell Heights history, reader Cara Nichols asked about a house in the North San Antonio neighborhood that portrayed Selena Quintanilla’s childhood home in the 1997 “Selena” movie scenes that were filmed here. The Terrell Heights home was used to depict the family’s house in Lake Jackson, Texas.
Readers with personal memories of the local shoot wrote to pinpoint the exact house, a one-story, midcentury home on Larchmont Drive that was of similar age, size and style to the one the Quintanillas shared before moving in 1982 to Corpus Christi. Quintanilla’s career took off there while she was still a teenager.
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There were several San Antonio locations used in the film about the breakout Tejano singing star, who was fatally shot March 31, 1995, by a former employee.
On Sept. 15, 1996, the Alamodome was used as a stand-in for the Astrodome, where Selena’s fans were invited to play an enthusiastic crowd in scenes of her Feb. 26, 1995, performance.
“We want people who will be excited and cheering just like that day,” director Gregory Nava – recently honored at the San Antonio Film Festival – told the Express-News, Sept. 13, 1996. “We want to see lots of flashing cameras.”
Karam’s Mexican Restaurant at 121 N. Zarzamora St., which closed in 2019, was used to portray Papagayo’s, Selena’s father’s restaurant in Lake Jackson, where Selena y Los Dinos, the Quintanilla family band, first performed in public.
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A River Walk bridge, the former Sunset Station (now the Espee), the Bun ‘n’ Barrel drive-in and other San Antonio landmarks also were featured, but the Terrell Heights location was special in that it portrayed the singer’s childhood home in multiple scenes and involved people who lived in the neighborhood.
The Terrell Heights house in the 100 block of Larchmont Drive was reasonably close in spirit to the Quintanilla house in Lake Jackson. According to real-estate listings, their one-story home in the 100 block of Caladium Street was built in 1953 and measured 1,510 square feet of living space. Its one-story filmed counterpart in the 100 block of Larchmont Drive, according to Bexar County Appraisal District records, was built in 1946 and had a little more than 1,460 square feet of original living space.
“We scouted that neighborhood extensively for this particular home location,” said Leighton A. Chapman, who was assistant location manager for “Selena” and served as San Antonio’s film commissioner from 2001 to 2003. He knows the neighborhood well, having lived for eight years in the Tanglewood Apartments on Brees Boulevard, where he had “a direct view of the stained-glass window at the (Sunset Ridge) Church.”
RELATED: Historic house on Alamodome grounds
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Reader Sally Flanagan lived next door to the location house. “Parts of the Selena movie, when Selena was a child, were filmed in a house on Larchmont Drive that belonged to Woodbridge Elementary teacher Cathy Canipe,” she wrote. Canipe, who died in 2024, “moved out during the filming, and the movie company repainted and redecorated her home.”
Meanwhile, Flanagan said, “the film crews used our driveway and watered our yard during watering restrictions (for) background shots. We had several friends that were extras and enjoyed all the activity.”
Jack Hebdon Jr. was one of them. “I had good friends who lived in the 100 block of Larchmont,” he said. “The Selena movie was going to film in a house next door to them and was looking for extras. I tried out and was selected to be the postman walking by in a scene of the family driving off to Corpus. Other friends and their kids were also in the movie.”
Chapman, who also worked on locations for “The Newton Boys” movie and “The Rough Riders” miniseries, noted that the movie house recently received “a complete gutting and redo.” Both the Larchmont Drive house and its inspiration in Lake Jackson – remodeled around 1975 – are privately owned and not open to the public.
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ON THE HEIGHTS: Reader Estelle Campbell Schweers has even older memories of the neighborhood and wrote to share her memories of growing up in the classic, planned suburban community. Developed during the late 1940s and early ’50s, it was tailored to young families of those baby-boom years.
“My family moved to the area in May 1953 after having visited many times from Warren, Ohio,” Schweers writes. “We lived on Brees Boulevard, and I used to ride my bike down to the Winn’s (store) at Sunset Ridge near the Woodmen of the World Hospital (covered here June 11, 2016).
Other businesses in the shopping center at 6310–6488 N. New Braunfels Ave. included a Mammy’s Cafeteria (a chain mentioned here June 24, 2017), “and up the hill, Waitz Model Market” at 62 Brees.
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“The road north of the hospital was called Klaus Road (now Eisenhauer) back then,” Schweers recalls. “I used to travel on it on my bike, riding to the newly opened Woodridge Elementary School. The Church of Christ (now Sunset Ridge Church) was located across Brees from the hospital’s chapel.”
The Sunset Church of Christ, at 291 Emporia Blvd., moved into the former tuberculosis hospital’s Fraser Chapel in 1959, three years after the fraternal organization closed the hospital. Schweers remembers that the Bexar County Red Cross moved into the original church building.
After occupying rented space at 3207 Broadway for years, the area Red Cross moved into its new quarters Feb. 26, 1966, according to the San Antonio Light, Feb. 25, 1966. The site is now, Schweers says, “a lovely park” developed by the Sunset Ridge Church’s Sunset Ridge Collective as a community space named Charis Park.
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Prompted by “great memories of a wonderful little neighborhood,” Schweers moved back to Terrell Heights a few years ago, settling on one of the streets from its first phase of development.
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