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The Burtis-Kimball House Hotel and the Burtis Opera House were located in downtown Davenport, Iowa, United States. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It has since been torn down and it was delisted from the NRHP in 2008. The theatre building has been significantly altered since a fire in the 1920s. Both, however, remain important to the history of the city of Davenport. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burtis-Kimball_House_Hotel/Burtis_Opera_House 

"Burtis-Kimball House" by Unknown - Davenport Public Library. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burtis-Kimball_House.jpg#/media/File:Burtis-Kimball_House.jpg  

Undated photo showing the opera house to the left and the hotel on the right.

The Burtis Opera House was opened in Davenport in 1867 at 415 Perry Street.[ The theater could hold an audience of 1,600 and it was a widely used facility. Mark Twain spoke to a sold-out house on his "The American Vandal Abroad" tour in 1869.  In March 1874 Susan B. Anthony lectured on the woman's right to vote. Al Jolson performed on the stage years after he worked as a singing waiter at Brick Munro's Pavilion in Bucktown. The Quad City Symphony Orchestra played its first concert as the Tri-City Symphony in the Burtis on March 29, 1916.

The Burtis was an elegant building constructed in the Second Empire style.  It featured a mansard roof with heavily hooded dormer windows. A bracketed cornice defined the transition from the roofline to wall elevation. A projecting pavilion with its own mansard roof contained the building's main entrance in the center of the façade.

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