Tower Theatre

Interstate Theatres opened the Tower on February 14, 1936, at Westheimer Road and Waugh Drive, with Miriam Hopkins in Barbary Coast. It was one of the first neighborhood houses in Interstate's push out of downtown Houston: the chain's North Main Theatre had opened on Christmas Day 1935, and the Tower and the Eastwood followed. Cinema Treasures and Houston film historian David Welling credit architect W. Scott Dunne, who had just designed the independent Delman Theatre. The single-screen Art Deco building, with roughly 1,100 to 1,200 seats, anchored the adjoining Tower Community Center.

The Tower booked several major engagements in the 1950s and early 1960s. Oklahoma! opened there in the new Todd-AO process on June 22, 1956, and ran 24 weeks. Sleeping Beauty opened on February 20, 1959, and Ben-Hur on April 29, 1960. On October 26, 1960, John Wayne's The Alamo opened at the Tower as a 70mm roadshow presentation, the same day it opened in New York and Los Angeles; a former Interstate employee recalled screening the 70mm print there about ten days early to check it. Another moviegoer remembered extra speakers set up in the back of the house for Earthquake in Sensurround in November 1974.

After its movie years the building went through several lives. In the 1980s it was a nightclub called Decadance at the Tower, then a Hollywood Video store, and by 2011 a Tex-Mex restaurant; Houstonia also lists stints as a performance venue and cabaret. The exterior has been altered only slightly, and the neon marquee survives. In 2025 Houstonia reported that developer Radom Capital was rebuilding the stage so the old theater could reopen as a jazz club, which made demolition appear unlikely. Houstonia calls the building a Montrose landmark that has held out against the neighborhood's slow gentrification.