Grand Opera House
704 Walnut Street,
Kansas City,
MO
64106
704 Walnut Street,
Kansas City,
MO
64106
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The Grand Opera House is listed in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Theatrical Guide. Managed by Hudson & Judah, it was on the ground floor and had 1,800 seats. Ticket prices 25 cents to $1. It had the “Edison system” of electric illumination. The proscenium opening was 40 feet wide X 39 feet high, and the stage was 34 feet deep. Unfortunately, there are almost no street addresses in this Guide.
A page has been created for the former Warder Grand Opera House/Auditorium Theatre.
The Warder Grand Opera House opened at 9th & Holmes in October 1887, was renamed the Auditorium Theatre by 1895 (possibly earlier) and was destroyed in a December 1897 fire. A replacement Auditorium Theatre opened on the same site in 1899. A 1960 newspaper story has the building catching fire while under demolition in that year, contradicting the kchistory site’s 1945 demolition date.
A couple of “40 Years Ago” columns in the Kansas City Times in May 1967 refer to these 1927 stories from the Times’s sister paper, the Kansas City Star:
May 1, 1927: “The Grand Opera House at the southwest corner of Seventh and Walnut streets has been converted into a garage and four storerooms. The theater was built in 1891.”
May 20-21, 1927: “The Auditorium theater, Ninth and Holmes streets, will open as a motion picture house tonight, operated by Samuel Harding, manager of the Liberty theater. (It formerly was the Warder Grand Opera House.)”
So it seems that the Grand Opera House and the Warder Grand Opera House were two different buildings. I don’t see an obvious Cinema Treasures listing for the Warder/Auditorium, and no theater on the site currently appears to map to 9th & Holmes.
Why Walnut Street?
Sites like https://kchistory.org/islandora/object/kchistory%253A108786 place the theatre depicted here at the NE corner of 9th / Holmes Streets, and say it was later named “Auditorium Theatre”.
https://kchistory.org/week-kansas-city-history/show-must-go says it was demolished in 1945.
This is all very confusing… Maybe we are talking about two theatres, but the image here is misleading?