After striking it rich in gold and silver and oil, Coloradans have self- consciously followed mineral rushes with a rush to culture.
Colorado’s rush to respectability became nationally apparent in 1881 when Horace Tabor declared he would give Denver the world’s finest opera house. Back then, opera houses were what performing arts centers are today: the measurement of a city’s cultural achievements and savoir-faire.
The Tabor Grand’s grand opening night was Sept. 5, 1881. Hundreds of carriages unloaded Colorado’s finest at 16th and Curtis streets. Ladies in evening gowns and gentlemen in tuxedos marveled at the five-story Tabor Grand Opera House. Its picturesque corner towers flowed out of a mansard roof of black slate shipped from Maine. Profuse white limestone trim contrasted with the red brick skin of the city’s most elegant structure. Inside, guests received the perfumed opening night program, hand-painted on silk and satin.
They admired the marble floors and staircase, gleaming cherry and mahogany trim, stained glass windows, tapestries and fabulous box seats. The massive rotunda chandelier shimmered with the glow of 144 gas jets sparkling through multiple prisms under a huge dome painted to look like a Colorado twilight sky.
This exquisite theatre, grander than anything seen in Denver before or since, fulfilled the fantasy of Colorado’s best known mining mogul. Horace Austin Warner Tabor’s silver mines made him the state’s most celebrated tycoon. He used his Leadville silver millions to erect some of Denver’s finest structures, including the Tabor Block at 16th and Larimer streets and two mansions on Capitol Hill. Of all Tabor’s monuments, however, none outshone the Tabor Grand Opera House. It symbolized how far this miner, and the mining state he would represent in the U.S Senate, had come.
After opening years with the world’s finest performers — including the divine Sarah Bernhardt — the Tabor Grand stooped to vaudeville and movies. Tickets, which had been $2 on opening night in 1881, fell to 10 cents during the 1930s. In its final years, the Tabor Grand even resorted to television, creating a miniature theatre off the Tabor’s huge mezzanine called “Tabor’s Television Room.”
In 1964, with very little protest, the old theatre was unceremoniously reduced to rubble. It was replaced by the Federal Reserve Bank — a cold, impenetrable concrete fortress where the feds shred old, worn out dollar bills. Today no trace, not even a historic marker, commemorates the opera house that put Denver on the cultural map. Denver’s interest in arts and culture rose to new heights with the Tabor Grand, giving rise to subsequent theatres, like the Broadway, Elitch’s, the Municipal Auditorium and a glittering gallery of theatres on Curtis Street.
At the Denver Performing Arts Center, Denver’s rush to culture has been perpetuated by visionaries like Don Sewall who used Bonfils Foundation and Denver Post millions to give the Mile High City the country’s largest — in terms of seats, anyway — performing arts center. Ellie Caulkins, spending oil money the way Tabor spent silver millions, gave Denver a magnificent opera house.
Each new cultural venue opens with great fanfare and earnest declarations of Denver’s successful rush to culture, but no mention of the prophetic lines Horace Tabor had painted onto the grandiose curtain of the doomed Tabor Grand Opera House:
So fleet the works of man
Back to the earth again –
Ancient and holy things fade like a dream
