Opera House

The Opera House was one of the early structures when much of downtown was concentrated on East and West Market streets around the railroad station. It was built sometime before 1885, and was a two story brick building with a central staircase up to the auditorium. Due to the slope of the land, the building was three stories tall in the rear.

It appears to have been vacant in 1896, and was used for a variety of commercial purposes for many years afterward. The 1914 Sanborn shows it returned to theatre use (it was used as storage in 1908), offering vaudeville and ‘moving pictures’. By then the area was rather marginal, with mostly warehouses and some substandard segregated housing, and the 1922 map shows the second floor as a ‘hall’.

The building was demolished by the mid-1960’s at the latest, as the American Tobacco Co. facility was expanded to take up the northern half of this block. The street number is a guess at what it would be today. Historically this building was at 70-72, but sometime around the late-1940’s, the numbers were changed.

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