Evangeline Theater

Movies were not new to New Iberia in 1930. In 1919 Julius Scharff bought the Elks Theater and added films, and it became the leading movie house in the region. The Evangeline was a former wholesale grocery remodeled into a theater around 1929, and a renovation in 1939 and 1940 gave it its Art Deco front of stucco and pigmented structural glass. That front has been restored to its 1940 look. The Sliman family gave the building to the city in 1994, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.1 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.2 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• The Dreyfus Building — steps away
• James Lee Burke — steps away
• William G. "Bunk" Johnson — steps away
• The Davis Building — steps away