Higgins Takedown

The legendary, long lost Tivoli Theater described in Harris Newmark’s memoir wrapped around this building. The auditorium seating faced north; the back wall of the stage sat a little bit north/east of the north wall of the Higgins. The south/back wall of the auditorium was a little more than 150 ft. to the south. This venue was constructed prior to the point when the city condemned land so as to create the back alley, which leads towards the cathedral bell tower. So the right side wall of the auditorium was located about 42 ft. beyond the east side of the present alley. As noted by Newmark, patrons walked thru an opulent entry garden off of Main Street (south of the Higgins) to get to the lobby. I think that there was a cafe or restaurant involved as well. The building was demolished not long after it was completed, within a year or two. It is not shown on any fire insurance map and I don’t know of any photographs of it. It was the successor Tivoli Theater to the small original on Court St. across from Temple’s Market Block (converted to the county courthouse during the Civil War).

ouch

What a drag, but that first photo is a stunner!

I… am… heartbroken. And for a motorpool! Sigh.

I am SO sad.. :(

Look at the top photo, the view towards the highrises: right side and across Main - site of the Newmark Adobe, where three of his kids died in one winter’s season of cholera. To the left of that - Levy’s Cafe & Restaurant, the most famous dining establishment in western America one century ago. It’s bottom floor remains. Behind Newmark’s was the site of the 6th U.S. Army’s Spring Street Corral in 1861, where Winfield Hancock discovered the remains of Said the camel, the poor dromedary that had been stomped to death the night previous by Edward Beale’s herd of humpbacks and this camel’s preserved remains can still be seen on display at the Smithsonian in D.C. Hancock’s house stood off to the left outside the picture, where the three coral trees innaugurated by Ladybird Johnson still grow. Hancock, he of Gettysburg fame, was destined to lose the presidential election of 1880 by the narrowest margin in U.S. history. His Main Street house had been constructed for him by Cameron Thom, whose own house stood at the left edge of the picture. This latter house was the first building in the city with walls constructed of brick, rather than adobe. Cameron was at the Gettysburg battle as well, fought on the Confederate side with Armistead and Garnett - the latter two’s actions are saliently described in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels which won the Pulitzer for history in 1977. Ted Turner adapted it to film in 1993 as Gettysburg.

Behind where you can see the water being sprayed is the south wall of the 1902 Ponet Block which replaced Thom’s residence. When this building was demolished in the 1980s, the mortar of the south wall was so embedded with that of the Wonderland Theater beyond, they simply had to leave it remain. As you walk by you can glance up and see where the beams of the second floor embedded into the brick. The upper story was used for a pool hall. The center commercial space of this building’s bottom floor will always remain Ground Zero to the history of modern American entertainment, as in April of 1902, cowboy become showman Thomas Tally opened his Electric Theater hereat. That was the first cinema in the Western World dedicated solely to projected film. It was simply an auditorium with permanent seating; it did not include any Kinetoscopes. Tally might or might not have sold popcorn or soda drinks in the lobby (Coca Cola then still contained extracts of the leaf of a plant grown in the Andes). Eight years hence, Tally and two associates would construct the Wonderland theater. This 1910 enterprise was completed just as construction was beginning on Clune’s Broadway Theater. The Wonderland may have been the first constructed cinema in the western U.S. And in 1887 the cyclorama of The Siege of Paris had been constructed where the second phase of The Medallion project will be located. The cyclorama was an architectural predecessor of sorts to film, a filmic adaptation of Edweard Muybridge’s illusory deck of cards. Members of the audience sat on a rotating platform in this tall circular space as they were twirled 360 degrees and observed a sequence of images painted on canvas by the staff of the famous French artisan Felix Philippoteaux. Of course, all of this history is inconsequential to civic overlords of our present time. But it certainly ought not to be - in the movie capital of the world.

Exactly.

We need, at the very least, a brass plaque, commemorating the site of the FIRST EVER PURPOSE-BUILT CINEMA. A plaque would only run a couple thousand bucks…anybody want to start a fund?

Total travesty… breaks my heart. The first gallery in Downtown and the birthplace of Gallery Row gone just like that.