Carroll Opera House
108-110 E. 5th Street,
Carroll,
IA
51401
108-110 E. 5th Street,
Carroll,
IA
51401
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This three story Romanesque structure was erected sometime after 1898. It was a brick veneered wooden building with stone accents on the facade. The ground floor was commercial space, while the auditorium occupied the upper floors. It is listed in the 1905 Cahn guide, with F. Florencourt as the manager.
It’s unknown exactly when movies began to be shown, but this was listed in the 1914-15 American Motion Picture Directory. The opera house remains in operation on the 1923 map, but by 1935 it is used as a dance hall. This likely closed around 1927-28, after the Earle Theatre opened next door.
The building remained in use until the early 1970’s, when the city succumbed to the madness of urban ‘renewal’ and destroyed all the structures on this block, replacing them with the very worst that decade’s architects had to offer. The street itself no longer exists on this block.
Contributed by
Seth Gaines
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Recent comments (view all 3 comments)
I cane across an item in a 1907 issue of The Billboard about a moving picture film bursting into flames at the end of a show in the Carroll Opera House. The building apparently suffered no serious damage, and the audience evacuated safely, but it cost the owner of the projector and films $150.00.
That’s probably from about the first year they could have been showing movies, right? Sounds like they maybe had it set up on the floor or balcony, rather than in a booth.
I’m not sure when itinerant movie exhibitors began touring Iowa, but in California they started as early as 1896. After the Orpheum circuit’s exhibition of films at the former Grand Opera House in Los Angeles that year, the whole show went on tour through the hinterlands of Southern California before settling into a semi-permanent home in the back room of Thomas Tally’s Edison Phonograph and Vitascope Parlors on Spring Street.
Carroll might have gotten a few such visits from movie exhibitors before 1907, but notifications in theatrical trade journals indicate that the Opera House was thriving with live performances into the early 1910s and was still advertising for them as late as 1921. Even its tenure as a movie house in the mid-1910s was probably only seasonal, though by that time they might have installed a permanent projection booth and probably had their own movie screen.