Winter Garden Theatre

The Winter Garden Theatre—turned Hippodrome, then basically back to the Winter Garden Theatre—was an intriguing but now largely forgotten part of reimagining this part of New Orleans just after the turn of the 20th century. It operated from 1906 to 1926 on a 20-year leasing agreement which included three attempts at being a movie theater and a lot of other concepts that didn’t really click with audiences of the day.

On the site of the future Winter Garden stood the long-standing 19th-century Thomson & Hudson Livery, offering horse and mule trading and sales, as well as a showroom for the latest in plows. Just two blocks away, architects Albert Toledano and Emile M. Wogan were helping to design the New Denechaud (later Hotel DeSoto and, in the 21st century, The Le Pavillon), a French Renaissance hotel with elevators, modern plumbing, electrical lighting, and fireproof construction. Toledano and Wogan had designed the uber-successful Grunewald Hotel Annex, bringing a nightclub to the area.

Musician and entrepreneur Thomas Preston Brooke commissioned Toledano and Wogan to design a spacious venue known as the Brooke Winter Garden, an Italian Renaissance style casino and winter garden that could seat 4,400 patrons at a projected cost of $350,000 to $400,000. When built, the Brooke Winter Garden came in incredibly south of that range at a more austere $75,000, and its spacious interior was more American shed than Italian Renaissance, but the project offered a fresh, urbane approach to NOLA nightlife. And it was just five blocks from bustling Canal Street.

The annual sublease was set at $13,000, for which Brooke signed on for five years, and the entire building had a 20-year initial period. Bathed in green and white and requiring just 25 cents for an evening of music combined with a botanical escape, the Winter Garden launched on November 1, 1906. The concept of a “Winter Garden” often meant a theater that served as a botanical escape from the surrounding city, featuring detailed foliage, floral decoration, and sometimes a glass ceiling, mimicking a tropical or conservatory atmosphere.

The reviews were decidedly unkind, citing that noise from patrons drinking, walking, and conversing made it challenging to hear the live music. Brooke’s financial situation was already questionable with the $300k delta between the Garden’s aspirational building budget and actual budget. That financial position was concretized when Brooke and the Winter Garden were bankrupt within five months—a decided failure in an otherwise booming area of town. It was a very discouraging opening act for the venue.

For its second act, the venue became the Winter Garden Opera House, staging operas without the food and beverage service. The audience was just as indifferent, and during that year movies were hustled in to augment live opera playdates - as they were in much smaller cities' fading opera houses around the United States. The audiences such as they were did not want a curtain call with the venue closing briskly before a year of operation.

The third act found New Orleans silent-era cinema veterans Josiah Pearce & Sons Syndicate taking over the lease, effective December 8, 1907, as the Pearce Winter Garden. Pearce & Sons were well known in carnivals but had also become New Orleans' first multi-cinema operator after instituting service in 1905 at the Theatorium. The Pearce’s grind policy of 12:30p start time to 10:30 p.m. end time each week did not last the full year. Likely because of site lines, seating count was said to be a more manageable 1,700 (floor seating not used and some upper level seats not sold). But even 1,700 seats were unnecessary due to lack of business. The Pearces closed unsuccessfully on July 4, 1908.

Showman Lew Rose then took on the venue as the Winter Garden (dropping Pearce’s). Rose brought his well known combination of live programming and some movies - and some stability - from his operation there from 1908 through 1911. The fourth act of the venue was as the Colonial Theatre, beginning on October 22, 1911, showing mostly films. This wasn’t quite a success, either, so branding and management changed to a more popular namesake of the era: the Hippodrome.

On December 22, 1912, the venue’s fifth act found it reopening as the renamed Hippodrome Theatre — movies and multiple acts of live vaudeville at just five and ten cents per admission at all times. Seat count was raised but hard to establish. The New Orleans iteration of the Hippodrome ended February 7, 1916, when J. Miller had seven one-reel showings of films and four vaudeville acts between them for his final bow before moving his programming to the Empire Theatre at 1010 Canal Street. It was a much more hospitable home. The final film in the building that night was Evelyn Selbie in “Across the Rio Grande".

When the Hippodrome closed after Miller’s show, some kid must have said, “This would make the biggest and best roller skating rink in the South". At 18,000 square feet, that’s just what happened days later. The sixth act for the building was as the Hippodrome Skating Rink, with William Parsons coming in from New York’s Madison Square Rink. Parsons installed London roller-skating veteran H. S. Booker as the first of two managers there. Booker had managed the massive 68,000-square-foot conversion of the Grand to the London Olympia skating rink as the roller skating craze had spread internationally during World War I. The Hippodrome rink opened auspiciously February 15, 1916; the space could accommodate some 2,000 skaters simultaneously but reports said that a mere hundreds attended - when added up for all three sessions. Not surprisingly, nine months later - and after the third session on November 15, 1916, under a new manager, the rink closed permanently.

An intermission of sorts followed for the building, which was rented out as an auditorium for parties and conventions on a light, as-needed basis in 1917. Events ranged in size and scope as any coin was accepted if the date were available. Political rallies, auto showcases, fraternal club shows, kids birthday parties - you name it. But in 1918, it became the Hippodrome Auto Showroom, an exposition space for new cars. That ended in October of 1920.

The seventh act took place in November and December of 1920 after a refresh removed the sign, revealing the Winter Garden signage still in place. Scheduled to become the Olympia Arena for boxing promoter Albert Pilsbury, it was changed—likely to take advantage of the existing signage—to the Pilsbury Gardens (and sometimes Pilsbury Winter Garden). The venue finally found its most loyal audience, with prize fights popular until the last bout on September 26, 1922. Pilsbury moved the next set of fights to the National Baseball Park at Third Street and Willow Street - another venue in need of usage after the Pelicans had bolted there for the new-build Heinemann Park (later Pelican Park).

For an encore, the Winter Garden/Hippodrome was used as an auto garage—a return of sorts to a livery—for the final three-plus years of the building’s leasing agreement. Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph, later Southern Bell, and later still AT&T, acquired the building and had it demolished for the first of two buildings on that spot. The first served as an exchange for 40 years, and the second was still in place in the 21st century for AT&T.

And how forgotten was the building? In 1972, the local newspaper ran an old picture of telephone employees in the Winter Garden / Hippodrome space doing some staging work. The newspaper explained that the information on the back of the old photo said the staging work was being done at the New Orleans Hippodrome. The paper explains that since there was no Hippodrome in New Orleans, that the location was mislabelled. When the local newspaper forgets a building of this scope existed, that’s a remarkably forgotten theater space.

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