Built at a cost of $60,000, the top two levels of the Metropolitan’s three stories were devoted to its 1200-seat theater, while the street level featured storefronts, a cagey hedging of bets on the part of Butsch. Other theater managers struggled with low attendance and protests by local clergy of the “immoral character” of the theater, so Butsch called his establishment a hall, rather than a theatre.
This site has not been specifically cited but based on dates opened this is likely the site visited by Mark Twain in 1868.
This was one of the legendary Newark showplace addresses at the busy corner of Halsey Street and Market Street. Opened in 1847, this location served 75 years of entertainment including live music, legitimate theatre, vaudeville, and movies. Beginning as Waller’s Opera House, Fred Waldmann took on the location changing it to Waldmann’s Opera House. The location would move to presenting vaudeville.
t is unknown if this is the location of Mark Twain's lecture. A literature search has so far failed to uncover another theater at this date.
The Building and Site. The structure was erected in 1867 at a cost of $89,000. It seated 2,000 persons. It opened on December 17, 1867, with a temperance lecture. Later it was sold and remodeled; it reopened as the Lyceum Theatre in 1898. In 1904 it was lost in a cataclysmic fire that claimed one additional theater and six stores in downtown Elmira. The theater was rebuilt and opened, still as the Lyceum, in 1905. It closed in 1926 and was demolished in 1949.
The original building on the site was Irving Hall, which opened in 1860 as a venue for balls, lectures, and concerts. It was also for many years the base for one faction of the city's Democratic Party.
Once Rochester's premier lecture hall, site of addresses by such luminaries as abolitionists Susan B. Anthony and William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and many others.
I have no direct information that the Opera House was the location of the Twain-Cable reading of January 13, 1885, but I found this listing in the Hannibal City Directory 1885-86. Hannibal Opera House Co., cor of 5th and Center, J.B. Price, manager, office at F. & M. bank.
Image: Hannibal, Missouri: Bluff City Memories By Steve Chou
Doerr's Opera House operated out of the second floor of the building on the northwest corner of 6th and Maine Streets.
http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/ref/collection/qpl/id/1589
The St. Louis Mercantile Library, founded in 1846 in St. Louis, Missouri, was originally established as a subscription library, and is the oldest extant library west of the Mississippi River. Since 1998 the library has been housed at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It has 600 feet (180 m) of papers, ledgers, and printed materials currently in 26 departmental or other record groups In 1986 the library received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities because of the collection's cultural importance.
January 8, 1885
From http://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/?p=2456 Chatterton Opera House, Posted on October 30, 2013 by editor
However, on March 17, 1876, Rudolph’s was almost completely destroyed by fire. “There is a story that Mr. Bunn, upon being awakened with the news that the Opera house was burning down, remarked that he couldn’t put it out, and turned over and went to sleep again,” Gib Bunn wrote.
The Victoria, one of the oldest continually operated theaters on the continent, was opened to the public as the Turner Opera House on New Year's Day, 1866, at a cost of $225,000. Its initial offering was the James Sheridan Knowles drama "Virginius, starring Edwin Forrest – a play strongly associated with the famous actor. According to press clippings of that era, the theater was referred to as "the best [sic] theater west of Philadelphia". General admission was $1.
Whitney s Grand Opera House on northwest corner of Shelby and Fort Streets seated 1 400 and was first used in 1875 and was torn down in 1887.
The history of detroit and michigan or the metropolis illustrated, Silas Farmer 1889
Magnificent, majestic and massive, Detroit’s old Federal Building and Post Office was a towering palace of government that was more than three decades in the making, took seven years to build — and only 34 years to outgrow.
“A Minstrel Town”, by Marion S. Revett, published by Pageant Press Inc. NY, in 1955. pp 87-97.
Wheeler Opera House, on the other hand, was a fabulous place (The Wheeler narrative is right after another hall called White’s). It became known all over the theatrical world for its modern arrangements, its magnificent decorations and its stage and lighting facilities. Jeff Wheeler, wealthy business man and sportsman, was proud of this monument to his family name.
Powers’ Theatre
A historic timeline of the Powers’:
Opera House Block 1874–1979
Powers’ Opera House (1874),
Powers’ Grand Opera House (1887),
Powers’ Theatre (1902–44),
Foto News (1944–48),
Midtown Theatre (1948–1972),
Civic Theatre (Under Renovation 1975–1977),
Demolished (Jan 1979)
One source reported that Platt's Hall opened in 1860. Jack Tillmany reports that the first newspaper accounts of events there that he found were in July 1862. The building was on the NE corner of Montgomery and Bush.
It's listed in an 1882 "Guidebook and Street Manual." It was still operating as late as 1885. The Mills Building was later on the site.
http://sanfranciscotheatres.blogspot.com/2019/01/platts-hall.html
Joe Vogel on January 5, 2012 at 4:52 am The Majestic Theatre was an extensive rebuilding of the Utica Opera House, which had been built in 1871. When Sam Shubert took over the lease on the Opera House in 1900, he had the building largely gutted and expanded to create a space for a more modern theater. In addition to the new Majestic, the building housed a second-floor assembly room at the Washington Street corner of the structure, and this was converted into the Orpheum Theatre in 1901.
Twain and Cable played at the Grand Opera House in Syracuse but it was not at the Wieting Opera House. The attached clippings, provided me by Kimberly Kleinhans, librarian, Local History/Genealogy, Onondaga County Public Library, describe the offerings at both venues.
Next door to the Sprague Block, on the southwest corner of State and Tioga, stood the Wilgus Block (1868). Brothers John M. Wilgus, an architect, and Henry L. Wilgus, a real estate dealer, built the Wilgus Block on the site of Dwight Tavern, an early "publick house." Wilcox and Porter of Buffalo designed the building. The Wilgus Opera House, seating 1600 people, occupied the third and fourth floors. Retail stores occupied the first floor, offices the second. The opera house was Ithaca's main entertainment center until the Lyceum Theater was built on South Cayuga Street in 1893.
The Troy Savings Bank was founded in 1823 and moved to its current location in 1870. In appreciation of the community's support, the plans for the new building called for a music hall to be built on the upper floors. In the early years of the 20th century the Music Hall featured performances from artists such as Lillian Nordica, Henri Vieuxtemps, Ignace Jan Paderewski, Albert Spalding, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Myra Hess and Jose Iturbi. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists including Vladimir Horowitz, Yehudi Menuhin and Artur Rubinstein played there.
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is a major performing arts venue in Brooklyn, New York City, known as a center for progressive and avant garde performance. It presented its first performance in 1861 and began operations in its present location in 1908.
I needed DuckDuckGo to find this location. http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/pj_display.cfm/8304
Image from: http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/MediaStream.ashx?mediaId=32523
November 21, 1884 and November 26th (two shows).
November 20, 1884
"From the daughter of Francis N. Bain, 1st proprietor, we have the following authentication: Mrs. John Nolle (Francis Bain Nolle) reminds us that the early Opera House on 2nd Street, just east of the hotel and the Academy of Music, on Broadway, west of Grand Street, supported interesting plays and singers. In fact, many of the plays that were to run on Broadway in New York City had try-outs in Newburgh. Also, Newburgh on the circuit of the early producers tours."
The firm also ran the "Chickering Hall" concert auditorium in New York City at no.130 Fifth Avenue, 1875-1901. The building was situated on the north-west corner (not north-east contrary to some sources) of Fifth Avenue and West Eighteenth Street, and was the venue for Oscar Wilde's first lecture in America. [Source: New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age, Robert A.M. Stern (Author), Thomas Mellins (Author), David Fishman (Author)]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickering_and_Sons