Dickinson Opera House

Dickinson’s population was in a growth spurt which would see it quadruple from under 1,000 citizens to 4,000 at the start of World War I. A good opera house was the foundation of a modern city in the late-1890’s and the second Dickinson Opera House was built opening by Reichert and Ray with 400 ground floor seats and 200 in the balcony. But this opening was unusual in that the old Opera House became the St. Charles Hotel. William Ray had a covered passageway connecting the Hotel to the Opera House so that folks could dine, pass through to the Opera House, and come back for dancing and drinking after. Cool!

Both the Dickinson Opera House and the St. Charles Hotel opened on January 28, 1897 with Gertie Keith & Bessie Seymour as the McSorley Twins in one of Keith’s last performances as she died two weeks later. By World War I, opera houses in small towns such as Dickinson were being outflanked by more profitable and popular movie houses.

How far had the fortunes of the Dickinson Opera House fallen? Reichert and Ray decided to disconnect the Opera House from the St. Charles Hotel and move it to much less desirable digs on First Avenue. And so after “The Squaw Man” in December of 1910, the entire Dickinson Opera House was uncoupled from the Hotel, jacked up and moved to its new location while the St. Charles Hotel expanded with 34 new rooms in the opera house’s footprint.

The Dickinson Amusement Company took on the flagging Opera House moving the Lyric Theatre and its movie programming there. It marketed as the Dickinson Opera House playing Lyric titles beginning April 23, 1917 with William S. Hart’s “Truthful Tulliver”. The venue had a two month old Kimball 8 ranks pipe organ for accompaniment. The venue also had two projectors to handle feature-length photoplays. (O.B. Frankenberg converted the old Lyric to a billiard parlor.)

Just about the four month mark, on August 22, 1917, the Opera House suffered a fire that gutted the rear of the venue valued at $7,000; that was good enough to not reopen as the Lyric / Opera House was clearly not faring well in the marketplace. Oscar Farr took on the venue and reopened it as a furniture and household goods store. The St. Charles Hotel, the former neighbor to the Opera House, was targeted by former Villard Hotel bellhop Jacob “Jackie” Nicholas Hecker who burned down the Hotel in the second attempt of the day on February 1, 1950. Hecker would then admit to burning down the other major downtown hotel, the Villard Hotel, a year earlier.

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