The Tabor Grand Opera House, not to be confused with the

Tabor Opera House The Tabor Opera House is an opera house in Leadville, Colorado. Opened in 1879, The building has been designated a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. History Built by Horace Tabor, who went on to become the to ...

Leadville The City of Leadville is a statutory city that is the county seat, the most populous community, and the only incorporated municipality in Lake County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 2,602 at the 2010 census and an estimated ...

, was a Denver

opera house An opera house is a theatre building used for performances of opera. It usually includes a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and building sets. While some venues are constructed specifically for o ...

and theatre built and subsidized by the silver magnate

Horace Tabor Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...

and his first wife

Augusta Tabor Augusta Pierce Tabor (March 29, 1833 – January 30, 1895) was the wife of a merchant and miner, Horace Tabor, the first white woman to live in the Idaho Springs mining camp, and a Denver philanthropist. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's H ...

Description

Located on Denver's Sixteenth Street, the high street of central-city Denver, the 1881 opera structure was meant to serve as a gathering place for the cream of Colorado's early-statehood society. The building was constructed in the

Second Empire Second Empire may refer to: * Second British Empire, used by some historians to describe the British Empire after 1783 * Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396) * Second French Empire (1852–1870) ** Second Empire architecture, an architectural styl ...

style to house and produce grand operas and live theatrical performances. Horace Tabor's finances were affected by his divorce from Augusta in 1882–83. With the collapse of Tabor's mining interests in the silver crash of 1893, the Grand Opera House went into a decline. Tabor liquidated his interest in the theatre in 1896. Under new management, the performance space evolved from live stage events and became a movie theater. By the early 1960s it had become a

grindhouse A grindhouse or action house is an American term for a theatre that mainly shows low-budget horror, splatter and exploitation films for adults. According to historian David Church, this theater type was named after the "grind policy", a film ...

. The theater building was town down by urban renewal leaders in 1964. As of 2022 the spot where the Grand Opera House had stood was marked by a historical marker. The marker is sited at N 39°44.833, W 104°59.717.

References

{{coord, 39.7472, -104.9956, type:landmark_region:US-CO, display=title Opera houses in Colorado Cinemas and movie theaters in Colorado Theatres in Denver Music venues completed in 1881