Palace Theatre

The Palace Theatre stands at 314 South Austin Street in downtown Seguin. Its history is layered. The 1983 National Register nomination for the Seguin Commercial Historic District dates the three-story brick building to 1927 and records a complete renovation in 1947. Cinema Treasures says the Palace opened as a movie theater on May 5, 1938, with 950 seats. On March 24, 1946, an explosion badly damaged the front of the building and set off a fire inside. The theater was rebuilt to plans by architect Jack Corgan and reopened in January 1947 in the Moderne style it still shows.

When the downtown district was listed in 1983, the Palace belonged to Seguin Theatres, Inc., which also owned the Texas Theatre on North Austin Street. Noting the 1947 rebuild and a replaced marquee, the nomination counted the Palace as noncontributing. That changed after a Texas Historical Commission resurvey in 2003, which singled out the 'moderne Palace Theater, featuring a large vertical neon sign and horizontal marquee' as a notable example of postwar design downtown. The boundary increase listed on August 14, 2003, counts it as a contributing building.

The Palace closed in 2002 and later reopened. By 2010 it had been split into two auditoriums seating 510 in all. Today its calendar runs to special screenings and community events: an annual Rocky Horror Picture Show night with a costume contest, a free marathon of classic Christmas cartoons during the holiday parade, and the Seguin Film & Arts Festival, a free day of short films from Texas and around the world with filmmaker question-and-answer sessions. Seguin's tourism office promotes the town to location scouts and lists The Great Waldo Pepper, Piranha, Dazed and Confused, 8 Seconds and the 2023 series Love & Death among the productions filmed in Seguin.