The 19th Century Was Hard on Milwaukee Theaters

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The 19th Century was a time when life was slower, married people stayed together and politicians kept their campaign promises. At least that’s what we’ve been told. The Gilded Age was notorious for using children to work in unsafe factories and mines. Pedestrians sidestepped two or three tons of horse manure excreted daily, myriad rats populated the sewers, and public buildings caught fire four or five times a year.

Even with gaslit streetlights and hotels by the mid-1860s, the loss of property and lives was still a danger of the day. The devastating Newhall House hotel fire in 1883 alone caused the deaths of 70 people. Theaters and music halls were particularly at risk because footlights and stage illumination were accomplished using buckets of low-quality, illegal oil that spontaneously ignited in just a few seconds. It would be years before smaller entertainment halls could afford to install gas.

In 1842, the settlement’s population was 2,100 when businessman John Hustis erected a rustic wooden building at Third and Juneau to present dramas and music. The pioneer theater included uncomfortable wooden benches in a seating area lit by guttering tallow candles. A troupe of actors from Chicago performed The Merchant of Venice for months. The fledgling venue became the first theater to catch fire in the city’s history.

Gardiner’s Hall opened in 1850 at Wisconsin and Water. Within three years, new owners renamed it the Metropolitan and then Van Liew’s Variety Theater. Nearby Albany Hall featured top-tier operas, musicals and dramas, with premium seats at $2 and general admission for $1. Celebrated actor Edwin Booth, the brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, performed Hamlet, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet. The $75,000 structure was consumed by flames when one of the actors accidentally upset a container of oil, necessitating an immediate evacuation of patrons. John Ryan’s Gaiety on Third Street presented third-rate vaudeville shows until his theater caught fire in 1869.

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Arson or Accident

William Young’s 1852 hall burned down three days after opening. His second theater burned in 1859 and destroyed an entire block. A third theater, on Milwaukee and Michigan Streets, became the Academy of Music and lasted for 60 years.

In 1893, a fire caused $35,000 worth of damage to the Grand Opera House at Wells and Water Streets. Matthew Thomet, a 22-year-old stagehand, was charged with arson six months later. During his trial, Thomet admitted to setting small fires in a barn behind the theater and the Republican House hotel. His mother showed the court a large dent in her son’s head where he had been hit in the head with a baseball bat. Despite acknowledgement of brain damage, Thomet was sentenced to eight years hard labor at the state prison in Waupun. The theater burned again in 1895 and the current Pabst Theater was erected on the site.

On July 26, 1896, Thomas Edison's Vitascope debuted at the Academy of Music. It was the first time a motion picture had been projected to an audience in the city. Blurry, unrefined film clips of trains coming and going from a New York elevated station, waves crashing on a beach, and two actors performing the kiss from Widow Jones thrilled audiences who returned again and again. The crude films appeared in music halls, saloons and outdoor amusement parks. In 1898 the Alhambra Theater showed scenes of the Spanish-American War. The films were exposed as fraudulent, having been made in a New Jersey movie studio. But after fifty years of theater fires, technological advancements helped reduce the dangers to a bare minimum.