San Juan Theatre

This entry is for a thrice-named neighborhood movie house that had a fifty-plus year run on Germantown Avenue. It began as the Oxford Theatre and was launched in 1914 as a silent film and vaudeville location running on a 20-year lease. During that time, the diminutive-for-the-era 400-seat venue converted to sound to remain viable.

A much larger and better-known Oxford Theatre opened about seven miles away likely creating a tinge of confusion. The Oxford Theatre’s name was changed in 1932 in a refresh to the Gem Theatre, a name it took from the former Gem Theatre location which closed less than two years prior about a mile and half away on S. Croskey Street. The Germantown Avenue Gem Theatre was the fourth and final Gem Theatre in Philadelphia running under that name for more than twenty years.

In 1941, the Gem Theatre was one of a group of theatres which received a Streamline Modern style makeover to the plans of David Supowitz. But the television era was challenging for neighborhood movie houses and the Gem Theatre closed briefly in 1950 and again in 1954. Unlike other theatres which were closed permanently, the Gem Theatre reopened soon thereafter under new independent operators now with widescreen projection and seating just 375 patrons. In 1957, the Gem Theatre was under the Gem Enterprises Corporation and struggling mightily.

With the population shifting after World War II, Felix S. Rodriguez took on the venue renaming it as the San Juan Theatre converting it to Spanish-language films throughout much of the 1960’s operating alongside the San Juan’s and Rodriguez’s sister theatre, the Puerto Rican Theatre which was also located on Germantown Avenue just nine blocks away.

As English-language neighborhood theatres began disappearing in Philly, Rodriquez began to show English language Hollywood films at weekend matinees at the request of some folks in the neighborhood concerned about sending their children to movies in the central business district. The San Juan Theatre ran into the 1970’s and later became a house of worship.

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