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Missouri
Tootle's Opera House
Tuesday, April 18, 1882
The Decorative Arts
Newspaper report
The St. Joseph Daily Gazette, April 19, 1882, 1
Newspaper advertisement
The St. Joseph Daily Gazette, April 18 1882
Tootles Opera House
504 Francis Street (at Fifth), St. Joseph, MO
Built: 1871 (Milton Tootle; architect Angelo Powell)
Opened: December 9, 1872
Seating capacity: 1500
Remodeled: 1923 as commercial office block
Later: The Pioneer Building, 502-514 Francis Street, St. Joseph, MO, 64501
Destroyed (fire): November 21, 2016 and subsequently demolished
Related:
Saving Places
The World's Hotel
12th and Penn Streets, St. Joseph, MO
Built: 1858 (as The Patee House)
Building extant: as Patee House Museum*
* A museum of communications and transportation. The building served as the eastern terminus of the Pony Express; the cannon which inaugurated the opening of the Express was fired in front of this building on April 3, 1860.
In the museum’s Blue Room the ‘George Warfel Westerners on Wood’ art collection features more than 40 life-sized portraits of famous westerners including Jesse James, who was shot dead in St. Joseph two weeks before Wilde's lecture.
Wilde wrote to Norman Forbes Robertson and an unidentified correspondent from The World's Hotel on April 19, describing the aftermath of the Jesse James shooting (Letters, 164).
See Oscar Wilde In America Blog: Pony Tale
Related source:
Oscar Wilde In America | © John Cooper, 2025
