Theater

Joe Vogel on December 8, 2025 at 2:55 pm

If this was in fact the first Odeon, which does seem likely, it was in operation by 1909, when the October 21 issue of The Lyons Daily News reported that a stage was being built at the house so vaudeville could be presented as well as movies. Since the house didn’t even get a sloped floor until the 1911 rebuild, it must have been a pretty primitive theater in its early years. The Odeon is also mentioned in the Daily News in 1915 and 1917, but I’ve found no mentions in between 1909 and 1915.

In fact I’ve found no mentions of any theaters in Lyons during that period in either the newspaper or trade journals, though the Lyric was listed in the 1914 AMPD, and I know there was a Butler Opera House listed in the 1897 and 1900 Cahn guides (a 500-seat upstairs house.) The opera house building was still standing in 1924, when it suffered damage in a fire, but by then the theater was gone. The remodeled building might have been largely intact until 2023, when the roof collapsed and the upper floor was subsequently removed (Reddit post.) The absence of the Odeon from the AMPD might have been an oversight. Clearly it existed in late 1911 when its photo appeared in The Billboard, and it existed in one location or the other in 1915, when it was mentioned in the newspaper.

I’m going to upload the 1911 photo here. If we discover that the first Odeon was somewhere else the photo can be removed.

SethG on December 7, 2025 at 6:50 am

This KHRI entry for a building to the south has a photo showing this building on the right edge: https://khri.kansasgis.org/index.cfm?in=159-3370-00002