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Sunshine Cinema




The shuttered Sunshine Cinema, set to be demolished this spring and give rise to a nine-story glass office building (to be leased at about $100 a square foot). Originally constructed as a Dutch Reformed church in the mid 1800’s, it was transformed into a Yiddish vaudeville house, the “Houston Hippodrome”, in 1908. (Two years after the Hippodrome’s opening, a Romanian Jewish immigrant named Yonah Shimmel, who had been selling knishes out of a pushcart, set up shop a couple doors down, in part to meet the needs of a hungry theater crowd). In 1917 the building became the “Sunshine Theater”, and over the course of the next few decades was re-named a couple times. As Yiddish theater faded in the years following WWII, the building became, among other things, another church, an athletic center, for most of the 70’s and 80’s a warehouse, and for a moment in the mid 90’s, a music venue. It was bought by Landmark Theaters in 2000, and underwent a $12-million dollar restoration before being opened as the Sunshine Cinema the following year.
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