Horace Tabor made his fortune in silver, and in 1881 he decided Denver needed an opera house worthy of it.
The Tabor Grand opened that year at 16th and Curtis Streets, and opening night newspapers described it afterward as “perfection.”
More than $800,000 went into the building, an enormous sum for the time which is equivalent to roughly $18–20 million today (Drypigment). Tabor brought in Chicago architects Frank and Willoughby Edbrooke to design it (the same Frank Edbrooke who would later design Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel).
The interior matched the ambition. A rotunda glistened with color, painted brick and white marble steps led up to a main auditorium that seated 1,550 beneath a ceiling of 144 gas jets arranged below an enormous chandelier.
The lobby contained a ceiling dome painted in the warm reds and oranges of a sunset over nearby Manitou Springs. Cherry and mahogany woodwork, stained-glass windows, and carpets brought from Chicago filled the building’s offices, saloon, and barbershop.
On opening night, Tabor presented gold watch fobs to grateful theater staff and held rates so high that even Denver’s wealthiest residents had to dress to the occasion. The famous soprano Emma Abbott performed for the celebrity crowd that filled the house.
The Tabor Grand didn’t stay at the center of Denver’s cultural life forever. The financial Crash of 1893 devastated Tabor’s silver fortune along with much of Colorado’s economy, and he lost the opera house to mounting debts.
In 1896, the Tabor Grand converted to showing motion pictures. The building continued operating as a movie house until 1921–22, when new owners hired Denver architects Fisher & Fisher to extensively remodel the interior and reopened it as the Colorado Theatre with seating expanded to 2,526 — at the time, the largest movie theater in the Rocky Mountain region (Cinema Treasures).
The Tabor Grand survived until 1963, when developers purchased the site for $634,000, less than it had cost to build eight decades earlier.
The theater was demolished to make way for a new home for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Denver branch.
The building’s ornate painted curtain, removed during an earlier renovation, had been placed in storage, where it slowly disintegrated and was eventually hauled to a dump (Zimmer).
A poem that appeared in the Denver press at the time of the demolition proved prophetic: “So fleet the works of men, back to the earth again, ancient and holy things fade like a dream” (Zimmer).
Standing at 16th and Curtis today, the Federal Reserve building holds the same corner, but there’s no trace of the opera house, the gas-jet chandelier, or the gold watch fobs that Horace Tabor handed out on opening night.
Editor’s note: I took the contemporary image while visiting Denver in June 2026. I thought the modern building was interesting even before learning about the incredible structure that had preceded it.
The pedestrianized 16th Street was a great place for a stroll and an interesting mix of old and new architecture, which I learned was due to the specifics of the large downtown urban renewal zone.
For this specific history I was fascinated to learn about the Tabor Grand in the book Lost Denver, which was actually sitting on the desk of my hotel room when I arrived (the Hyatt Regency just a block or so from 16th). The book had a lot of other really interesting lost Denver buildings too:
Sources:
- Zimmer, Amy. Lost Denver. Pavilion Books, 2016.
- Colorado Encyclopedia, “Tabor Grand Opera House” — https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/tabor-grand-opera-house
- Colorado Virtual Library, “Time Machine Tuesday: The Tabor Grand Opera House” https://www.coloradovirtuallibrary.org/resource-sharing/state-pubs-blog/time-machine-tuesday-the-tabor-grand-opera-house/
- Cinema Treasures, https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/19055
- Drypigment, “Travels of a Scenic Artist and Scholar” — https://drypigment.net/2020/02/16/travels-of-a-scenic-artist-and-scholar-denvers-tabor-grand-opera-house-and-scenic-artists-robert-hopkins-1881/
- Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Denver
- Opera house image, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018647154/
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