It's ironic.

Steinberg's Grand Opera House was
located on Front Street in Traverse
CIty.

Hundreds of Traverse City people travel to the Sands Showroom in Leelanau for entertainment these days. But a hundred years ago, Leelanau people invariably traveled to Traverse City when they wanted entertainment.

Of course, Traverse City was, well, a city, and could offer much more than any of Leelanau County’s several villages.

A 1903 “Chamber of Commerce” publication boasted: “We have two first class theatres. Steinberg’s Grand Opera House will seat 800 persons. It is a beautifully decorated theatre, with upholstered chairs, splendid ventilation and most excellent accommodations.”

On Aug. 20, 1904, the Enterprise carried a Page One advertisement for a production at Steinberg’s. The ad carried an outline of the plot for At Cripple Creek, which was billed as dramatist Hal Reid’s “Most Famous and Successful Play.”

The four-act play was touted as being able to provide spectators with “a graphic and true-to-nature glimpse of life in the mining region of Colorado in the early eighties.”

The play featured female characters such as Belle Gordon and Dynamite Ann. “Martin Mason, the leader of a desperate band of outlaws, furnishes the villainy of the play,” the billing claimed.

From the billing, one can practically visualize the play as a silent movie. Indeed, the “flicker pictures” would take the entire country by storm in just a few years. Finally, it was announced “a carload (railcar) of special scenery is carried for the presentation of this fine drama, and it is acted by one of the strongest casts ever engaged for melodrama.”

Among the actors who performed at Steinberg’s was William S. Hart, who later became a familiar figure in early motion pictures – playing a cowboy before Tom Mix, Gene Autry and others came on the scene.

The opera house, built in 1891 by Julius Steinberg, was located on Front Street about a block and a half east of the more familiar City Opera House, which has been restored in recent years to its former glory. Its seating capacity of 800 was two-thirds that of the City Opera House, which accommodated 1,200 and was also “designed for the production of the drama, and is used for conventions, balls, etc.,” according to the 1903 Chamber publication, which added that “first class productions come to both houses.”

Actually, the term “opera house,” if not an outright misnomer, is misleading. The above description of the actual uses is more accurate.

Julius Steinberg, an immigrant who had started out as a peddler, had a dry goods store on the ground level of the three-story building. Later, Steinberg’s store space was occupied by McLellan’s Five and Ten.

Steinberg, who came from Czarist Russia and initially knew scarcely any English, sold his wares to area farmers’ wives. He probably called at a number of Leelanau households. His ascent in the local business world was a true “Horatio Alger” success story.

With the advent of movie theatres, the two opera house were used less and less, and, finally, not at all. No audiences, no encores, only empty stages and empty seats. There was no conversion to other uses in either building and dust settled on the fixtures.

Interestingly enough, Julius Steinberg may be said to have “hedged his bets” and constructed his own movie house – the Lyric – to the east of his opera house in 1916. It burned in 1923, was rebuilt, and burned again in 1948. After the second fire, a brand new theatre, the State, was built on the site.

“The coming of the movies was one of the factors that doomed the opera house,” wrote Michigan historian Willis Dunbar. “The building of high-school gymnasiums, which also served as auditoriums particularly during the 1920s, provided a center for community activity that was preferred to the opera house. The latter, often being situated on the second floor of buildings, could not be changed into a movie house because of fire regulations.”

Mc Lellan’s dime store was still in operation in 1963 when a fire struck the Elks Club, immediately to the west. The top two floors of the Elks Club building were razed following the fire.

Although Steinberg’s didn’t burn, the building was structurally weakened. The opera house hadn’t been used for decades, and there was no prospect for it ever to be used again, so the building, too, was razed of its top two stories.

Any would-be phantoms had already scurried away and the final curtain came down on an era that was already history.