Home›Places›Tampa, FL›Victory Theatre / Palace Theatre
Historic place

Victory Theatre / Palace Theatre

700 N Tampa St, Tampa, FL

A vaudeville house that became the only Cinerama theater within 500 miles and ran The Sound of Music for a year and five months.

📅 1920–1977🏛️ TheaterDemolished
Open on the mapSlide back to 1920

The story

The Victory Theatre opened on August 11, 1920 on the northwest corner of Tampa and Zack Streets, with the vaudeville show The Brat. It began as a playhouse, later adding silent and sound films. The builders called it absolutely fireproof. It reopened on Christmas Day 1947 as the Palace after a renovation.

The Palace was the first Tampa theater to show CinemaScope, in 1953, with The Robe. In 1962 it installed three-projector Cinerama, with a curved screen 75 feet wide and 32 feet high, and it was the only Cinerama venue within 500 miles. The 1965-66 roadshow of The Sound of Music ran a record one year and five months.

The theater closed on September 29, 1977, with It's Alive and Five Fingers of Death. It was demolished in December 1979, and one fan at the demolition found the projection booth stripped bare and took Cinerama reservation pads and strips of the screen.

What's There Now

A seven-level parking garage serving the SkyPoint condominium tower occupies the site.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

It was the first Tampa theater to show CinemaScope, with The Robe in 1953.
Its Cinerama screen curved 146 degrees.
A seven-level parking garage for SkyPoint condos now stands on the site.

Nearby history

Maas Brothers Department Store

700 N Franklin St · 88 m away
Tampa's hometown department store started with a 23-by-90-foot shop and ended as a parking lot after the condos never ca

Franklin Theatre / Florida Theatre

710 N Franklin St · 88 m away
A theater named in a $50 public contest in 1924 was cleared with its whole block in 1978 for a power company headquarter

Curtis Hixon Hall

600 Ashley Dr · 112 m away
Tampa's riverfront arena hosted Elvis, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead before it was torn down in 1993.

Wallace Stovall Tampa Tribune Building (GTE Building)

601 N Ashley Dr · 117 m away
A 1920s brick building built for the Tribune's publisher, later a GTE building with a 1970s stucco skin, came down in Ma

Tampa Theatre

711 N Franklin St · 130 m away
Tampa's first air-conditioned commercial building was nearly lost in 1973, and it is still showing movies under a painte

The Hub Bar

719 N Franklin St · 137 m away
A downtown Tampa dive that traces itself to 1949 and moved into its Franklin Street building in 2002.

Know something about Victory Theatre / Palace Theatre? An old photo, a date, a memory of what stood here before?

Add it on the map
Sourceshttps://www.cinematreasures.org/theaters/17395