It opened on September 12, 1930, as a combined movie and stage house and was promoted as the largest theater of its kind between New Orleans and Los Angeles.
El Paso · Opened 1930 · operating
125 Pioneer Plaza, El Paso, TX 79901
The Plaza Theatre opened in downtown El Paso on September 12, 1930. Its first film was the musical Follow Thru, and El Paso Inc. reports that more than 4,400 people came. Dallas architect W. Scott Dunne designed it and C.A. Goetting built it. Behind a narrow Spanish Colonial Revival entrance, Dunne fitted an atmospheric auditorium of 2,410 seats on three levels, its side walls stepped like the terraces of a Spanish garden under a ceiling of twinkling pin lights, with cloud and bird machines. The theater was promoted as the largest of its kind between New Orleans and Los Angeles and had refrigerated air and a Wurlitzer organ shipped from New York on July 30, 1930.
The Plaza mixed movies with live shows. Its National Register nomination lists Mae West, Ethel Barrymore, Tallulah Bankhead and John Wayne among the performers, and a Saturday-morning Mickey Mouse Club ran there until World War II. By the 1960s neighborhood theaters were drawing its audience away. The organ was sold in 1972 to an airline pilot in Dallas, and in 1973 ABC Interstate sold the building to Mike Dipp of El Paso. The nomination says it then stood unused until 1978, when a Dallas operator leased it for Spanish-language films.
In the 1980s the building was in line to become a parking lot. The El Paso Community Foundation had six weeks to raise the money, and a day before the January 1987 deadline Rita Moreno headlined a benefit at the theater that raised $1 million toward buying it. The Plaza was listed on the National Register on June 4, 1987. The foundation put on a new roof and gave the building to the City of El Paso in 1990.
The foundation also bought back the organ and installed it in the Sunland Park Mall food court, where volunteers played it daily from May 10, 1998. In 2002 the city and the foundation agreed to restore the theater, and it reopened on March 17, 2006, with Riverdance. The organ, renamed for broadcaster Karl O. Wyler and his wife Glyn, came home on November 3, 2006, and the restoration won a National Preservation Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2009.
Movies returned in 2008. The foundation bought 35mm and digital projectors and staged The Movies Return to the Plaza Theatre, conceived by its chief executive Eric Pearson and film enthusiast Charles Horak; more than 25,000 people saw more than 60 films. Renamed the Plaza Classic Film Festival in 2009, it averages about 40,000 admissions a year, with volunteer organists playing the Wurlitzer before screenings. Its 19th edition ran July 16 to 26, 2026.
| The first film shown was the musical Follow Thru, and more than 4,400 people attended opening day. | ↗︎ |
| Mae West, Ethel Barrymore, Tallulah Bankhead, Blackstone the Magician and John Wayne appeared on its stage, and it ran a Saturday-morning Mickey Mouse Club for children from the 1930s until World War II. | ↗︎ |
| In 1978, after several years unused, it was leased by a Dallas theater operator to show Spanish-language films. | ↗︎ |
| Its original Wurlitzer organ, Opus 2123, was sold in 1972, bought back by the El Paso Community Foundation in the 1990s, and returned to the theater on November 3, 2006, as the Wyler Mighty Wurlitzer; it is one of the few theater organs still in its original theater. | ↗︎ |
| Since 2008 it has been the main venue of the El Paso Community Foundation's Plaza Classic Film Festival, which bills itself as the world's largest classic film festival and averages about 40,000 admissions a year. | ↗︎ |
| The festival screens archival 35mm prints where it can get them; the foundation installed 35mm and 2K digital projection, upgraded to 4K in 2018. | ↗︎ |
Plaza Theatre: Susan Barnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; Plaza Theatre: Donitza Marie, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons; Plaza Theatre: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.