Link to isle culture's origin rediscovered
reprinted with permission from The Galveston County Daily News

By Mark Muhich
Correspondent

Published February 25, 2000 1:03 AM CST

GALVESTON -- When demolition crews jack-hammered the brick and granite shell from the E.S. Levy Building at the corner of 23rd and Market streets, they exposed cast-iron columns dating to 1870 and a history that traces to the earliest flowerings of Galveston culture.

The Levy building was built in 1895 atop the first story of the Tremont Opera House, which opened on this date 130 years ago.

A rousing performance of "The School for Scandal," a vaudevillian comedy called "The Gorilla" and a series of songs sung by "the Swedish nightingale," Jenny Lind, opened the Tremont Theatre's quarter-century run on Feb. 25,1870.

The Galveston Opera House was built by Galveston News editor and senior proprietor Willard Richardson.

The theater, designed by Galveston architect T.H. Adams, was renamed the Tremont. It drew international stars of stage and opera.

Richardson fulfilled his passion for theater by building the Tremont on the site of his newspaper offices, which the Galveston fire of 1869 destroyed along with more than 100 other downtown buildings.

His Tremont Theatre replicated the famous Booth Theatre in Manhattan, whose owner, Edwin Booth, performed many times at the Tremont, and whose brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated President Lincoln.

Richardson strove to lift the cultural life of Galveston that boomed after the Civil War. The city's population tripled by 1880.

Richardson succeeded eminently, and though he died in 1875, The Tremont Theatre was a cultural mecca in the Southwest until it closed in 1895 when The Grand Opera House opened on Postoffice Street.

The building was sold to E.S. Levy, the Galveston dry goods retailer, who tore off the top story of the Tremont Opera House and erected a five-story office building, the first modern office building in Galveston.

Noted Dallas architect C.W. Bulger preserved the beaux-art cast iron facades on the north and west sides of the building by erecting a glass curtain around the building's exterior, a modern innovation for the time.

The Tremont's Italianate details and Corinthian columns have been hidden in brick and granite since the late 1940s. Historians believe the columns were cast near Albany, N.Y., the center for cast-iron architecture.

mdg@mgaia.com
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