Gem Theatre

Joe Vogel on July 31, 2025 at 1:46 pm

The January 5, 1935 issue of Motion Picture Herald published a list of theaters then being operated by Paramount. Two houses at Conroe were on the list; the 250 seat Gem and the 400-seat Liberty. The Gem was at 104 Simonton Street, and the building was standing as late as January, 2019, but had been demolished, along with its neighbors, by May of 2022.

A walking tour of downtown Conroe (PDF of the brochure here) says that William Conroe opened the Gem Theatre at this location by 1917, and that during the later 1930s it operated for a while as an African-American house called the Star Theatre.

In the 1920s, the Gem must have operated under two akas, as the 1927 FDY lists a 250-seat house called the Rex and the 1928 and later editions list a 250-seat house called the Palace. The Palace was listed as a silent house in 1931 (Conroe does not appear in the 1930 edition at all) and in 1932 as both silent and closed. The Gem name first appears in the 1933 edition, the house having reopened (as noted in the original description) by June 3, 1932.

The 1926 FDY lists only a 300-seat house called the Majestic, which continues to be listed at Conroe through 1932. In 1933, a 300-seat Palace is listed along with the 250-seat Gem, and in 1934 comes the first listing of the 400-seat Liberty. This might have been an expansion of the Majestic. Other sources indicate that the Liberty was at the corner of Main and Collins Street (which now might have been renamed Metcalf St.), and the building was demolished in 2006, having by then been used as a warehouse for a furniture store for many years. One anomalous listing of a 300-seat house called the Dugan appears only in the 1929 FDY.