Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The name on the marquee is not a mood - it is the owner. The Joy Theater at 1200 Canal Street opened on February 7, 1947, named for veteran theatre operator Joy Houck, who built it with partner Levere Montgomery for 275,000 dollars as New Orleans' newest and most modern film temple, complete with a glass-enclosed crying room behind the back row for parents with restless infants. Designed by Favrot and Reed with an unmistakable neon marquee, the 1,250-seat Joy was the first movie palace built in New Orleans after the Depression and the wartime construction ban - the kid brother of Canal Street's older palaces, the Saenger, Loew's State and the Orpheum. The house ran movies for over half a century - including a late, unsuccessful three-screen conversion - before closing in 2003 against the megaplex tide; two years later Katrina's floodwaters inundated the building and left it dark. A four-partner local group bought the wreck and ran a fast-track restoration, reopening the Joy in December 2011 as the first downtown theatre back in permanent operation after the storm - billed at the time as the opening act of Canal Street's theatrical renaissance. The modern room is a 10,000-square-foot multi-purpose hall holding 1,200 standing or about 656 in theatre seating, with a fixed stage, three permanent bars, multi-tiered balcony seating and a state-of-the-art production rig, refreshed again in a 2019 cosmetic renovation. The calendar mixes touring bands, comedians, film screenings, corporate events and private receptions, with the marquee sitting at the junction of the Canal and Rampart streetcar lines a short walk from the French Quarter and the Superdome. Of the four original downtown movie houses the Joy was the least grand - which makes its survival the sweetest: the modern one restored, relit and working, its 1947 neon still the brightest thing on its block of Canal.