Downtown's Gilded Marquees: Hotels & Movie Palaces

For about two decades on either side of 1910, San Antonio's downtown blossomed with the grandest hotels and theaters money could build — marble lobbies for cattle barons and oil money, and movie palaces dressed up as Spanish courtyards and Mayan temples for a city eager to feel like a metropolis. This walk covers six of them in a few easy blocks: three hotels that have hosted everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to touring dignitaries, and three atmospheric movie houses built to transport moviegoers somewhere far from San Antonio for the price of a ticket. Together they're the reason downtown's skyline still reads like an early-20th-century postcard.