The Ritz On Sixth

The Ritz opened on the thirteenth of October, 1929, built by J. J. Hegman, and it was the first theatre in Austin constructed specifically for sound pictures. It ran first run westerns at the cheapest ticket in town, often with a country act playing live before the film. Hegman's son Elmo took over in 1937 and widened the building by twenty five feet to seat eight hundred, then closed it in 1964 when television took the audience away. What happened next is the part that matters to Austin music. In 1981 Shannon Sedwick and Michael Shelton leased the building and handed the running of it to Craig Underwood, who booked it as a punk club. Black Flag opened that era on the seventh of May, 1982, and the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, Husker Du, the Circle Jerks and the Misfits followed. A hardcore scene that had nowhere to play in Texas suddenly had a thousand seat room on Sixth Street, and the Austin punk audience of the 1980s was largely built inside it. The building has since been a cabaret home to Esther's Follies, a cinema again after Tim League of the Alamo Drafthouse restored it in 2007, and a comedy room. The marquee has been lit through nearly all of it. Very little of Sixth Street's original theatre row survives, and this is the piece of it that never stopped being used.