The Cinema Park was built in the late 1960s by McLendon Theatres of Dallas.  It was similar to other McLendon Drive Ins, that were in other Texas cities.  This one had three screens.  When it was built, it had one large central projection room atop the snack bar that served all three screens.  A few years later, the snack bar burned, and when it was rebuilt, separate projection rooms were built in each of the three lots.  It was leased  out to a few different operators in later years, but the final operator was my dear friend, Bob Hartgrove.  I lived a couple of blocks from the Cinema Park, and could easily see the movie on Screen One from my driveway!  Screen 2 had it’s back facing my house, and screen 3 was angled as such I could only see the beam from the booth.  The snack bar caught fire and was totally consumed once again in 1991.  The landlord would not rebuild it, and offered to let Hartgrove out of the lease.  Bob, showman that he was, got a catering truck and sold concessions from it for nearly three years until his lease finally expired!   Bob retired after that, and passed away a few years later.

These pictures were taken about a year after the Cinema Park closed.  The west Texas winds wreaked havoc on screen 3, and the marquee.  That red thing is a relic of 1960s drive in theatres.  It is a driveway light fixture.  It had a light bulb in it, and light came out through the holes, so it wasn’t blinding.  There were usually at leas six of them to guide cars through the driveways.  The Valley Hi had these, as did the Dixie in Seguin.

There are now homes built on the Cinema Park property.