Your next Trader Joe’s run could take you inside a piece of Houston movie history.
At the corner of South Shepherd Drive and West Alabama Street, shoppers pick up groceries in a building that once drew crowds for an entirely different reason. Before it became a supermarket—and before its long stint as a bookstore—the Alabama Theatre was a neighborhood cinema, welcoming its first moviegoers on November 2, 1939.
Almost 87 years later, the building is still part of everyday Houston life. You won’t find a screening room inside, but look up from your shopping list and you can spot a particularly striking reminder of its former life.
It opened with a Jack Benny movie in 1939
The Alabama Theatre made its debut with Man About Town, starring Jack Benny and Dorothy Lamour. It opened the same year as Houston’s River Oaks Theatre, bringing another distinctive Art Deco cinema to the city.
Over the following decades, the Alabama screened films including The Sting, The Omen and American Graffiti. In 1980, fans lined up for hours to see The Empire Strikes Back—a very different kind of queue from the grocery checkout lines you’ll find here today.
Its run as a movie theater ended in 1983. But rather than disappearing immediately, the building found a new use that kept many of its theatrical features in place.
Before the groceries came the books
In 1984, the former cinema reopened as Bookstop.
The bookstore retained much of the theater’s character, including its ceiling, murals and balconies.
There was even a possibility that the conversion might someday be reversed. Bookstop co-founder Gary Hoover told the Houston Chronicle that the architects had planned the adaptation with a potential return to theater use in mind. That comeback never happened: the bookstore closed in 2009, ending a roughly 25-year chapter in the building’s history.
The building faced an uncertain future
The Alabama’s survival wasn’t guaranteed.
After Weingarten Realty purchased the surrounding shopping center in 2004, redevelopment proposals raised the possibility of demolishing the former theater for a high-rise development. Preservation Texas placed the building on its endangered-places list in 2007 because of that threat
Then, in 2011, Trader Joe’s announced plans to move into the space. The grocery store opened on September 21, 2012, giving the former cinema another life—though the conversion did not preserve the interior exactly as longtime visitors remembered it.
Look up for a surviving Art Deco detail
The standout feature to look for today is the turquoise Art Deco ceiling medallion.
It was restored during the conversion from bookstore to supermarket and remains one of the most noticeable remnants of the Alabama Theatre. The marquee entrances at the front and back also reference the building’s cinema history.
This isn’t an untouched movie palace with grocery shelves added. The renovation changed the space, and its reception wasn’t universally enthusiastic. But the surviving details give shoppers a tangible connection to a building that has served Houston as a cinema, a bookstore and now a neighborhood grocery store.
Where to find it
The former Alabama Theater-turned-Trader Joe’s is located at 2922 S. Shepherd Drive, Houston, TX 77098. The grocery store is open daily from 8 a.m.–9 p.m.
