The longtime Oak Cliff resident who owns the Kessler Theater has plans to buy the Longhorn Ballroom and bring it back to its former glory.
Edwin Cabaniss told the Dallas Morning News that he’s working on a deal to preserve the theater, which is best known as the place where the Sex Pistols opened their disastrous U.S. tour in 1978. But it has a history going back to the early 1950s, when it opened as Bob Wills’ Ranch House, and the list of country-and-western luminaries who performed there is as long as your arm. It was also once owned by Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby.
Cabaniss purchased the Kessler Theater in the late ’00s, when it had been boarded up for decades, and turned it into a unique live-music venue. A few years ago, he did the same thing with the Heights Theater in Houston. The Longhorn Ballroom is a totally different animal. It can hold about 2,000 people, quadruple the capacity of the two other venues.
Preservation Dallas named the Longhorn among its list of Dallas’ “most endangered historic places” last year.
