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Retail Center History At San Felipe St. And Voss Rd.


matty1979

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I remember a Jerry Lewis Movie Theater somewhere around there, and I think it was at Voss and San Felipe. It was one of a number of movie houses Jerry Lewis opened back in the 70s promising they would only show G-Rated "family" oriented movies.

 

They were locally owned franchises and they only lasted a few years. They didn't fail because of poor attendance, but because the business model never worked. They were history by 1980.

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The Jerry Lewis movie theater was on Fondren @ Westheimer. It was in a strip center on the NW corner.

 

The strip center is still there, and it's easy to identify where the theatre was, due to it's raised roof line behind the entrance. It looked like the one in this picture. The theaters were a spectacular failure, none of them lasted long.    

post-194-0-73274000-1392769319_thumb.jpg

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For the longest time, San Felipe stopped at Voss. Later it was extended up to Buffalo Bayou but the bridge connecting to the other side was held up for years. I think Elanor Tinsley was the person who finally got the Memorial Villages (Kinkaid types) to finally drop their objection to completing the road. Now it's just another thoroughfrare that thousands of people drive everyday, never knowing that it was once the center of a controversy between the working types and elites of Houston.

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  • 3 years later...
On February 22, 2014 at 10:45 AM, plumber2 said:

For the longest time, San Felipe stopped at Voss. Later it was extended up to Buffalo Bayou but the bridge connecting to the other side was held up for years. I think Elanor Tinsley was the person who finally got the Memorial Villages (Kinkaid types) to finally drop their objection to completing the road. Now it's just another thoroughfrare that thousands of people drive everyday, never knowing that it was once the center of a controversy between the working types and elites of Houston.

The Memorial Villages are an incorporated group of cities and have nothing to with Kinkaid, other than the fact that the school is located on the edge of Piney Point. The Kinkaid School draws its student population from all corners of Houston. Only a small percentage of the students actually live in Memorial Villages. 

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  • 2 months later...

Wildcat, I didn't mean to imply that Kinkaid students or alumni are bad people, I was just trying to make the point that the road extension was held up for years, by the village people (Piney Point, Hunters Creek and the others too). It just seemed like they wanted to keep us folks out that lived on the other side of the bayou from them. At least it felt that way to us.

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On 2/17/2014 at 6:56 PM, KinkaidAlum said:

Another strip center. Back in the 1980s, there was an arcade game room and the Original Antone's Po-Boys and a few other things that we used to sneak off campus to visit.

The original Antone's was on the corner of S. Main  and OST in the old Sinclair service station back in the 60s I used to ride my bike up there and buy sandwiches for the family. 

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15 minutes ago, blue92 said:

The original Antone's was on the corner of S. Main  and OST in the old Sinclair service station back in the 60s I used to ride my bike up there and buy sandwiches for the family. 

 

You are right. I was just calling it an Original Antone's because the majority of the ones in existence now are not part of the "original" chain.

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I am old enough to know what was originally at the SE corner of San Felipe at Voss! Arriving in the area in 1968, we occasionally shopped at the grocery store that was the main building, on the east side of the property, there. It was a ------ PIGGLY WIGGLY! This is where that gym was in the 1980's, something I also went to. Originally, there was a corner gas station, and a small, L-shaped, strip center, across the parking lot and to the west of the Piggly Wiggly. Where the actual Kroger is now, was originally an undeveloped field. These can all be seen in the 1966 historicaerials.com photo. The Kroger finally shows up in the 1995 historicaerial  By the way, the large building, now just to the east of the old Piggly Wiggly (now a 24 hour Fitness), was a Rice Epicurean Supermarket in the 1980's. It shows up in the 1973 historicaerial, but I am not sure if it was a simple Rice Foods, or something else, back then.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_Epicurean_Markets

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On 2/22/2014 at 3:03 PM, matty1979 said:

This is the movie theater as of this morning. Was the Stein Mart next door part of the theater?

The Steinmart space was a large S&H Green Stamps redemption store in the 1960's. I went there with mom. I also went to that theatre to see some second run movies, but it was not the Jerry Lewis, anymore, by then. I remember seeing "Doctor Doolittle" there in the late 1960's.

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11 hours ago, detached said:

The Steinmart space was a large S&H Green Stamps redemption store in the 1960's. I went there with mom. I also went to that theatre to see some second run movies, but it was not the Jerry Lewis, anymore, by then. I remember seeing "Doctor Doolittle" there in the late 1960's.

The Jerry Lewis Cinema chain started in 1969 at the earliest. The theater may have pre-dated it...?

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  • The title was changed to Corner Of San Felipe St. And Voss Rd.
  • The title was changed to Retail Center History At San Felipe St. And Voss Rd.

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