< Previous10 THE GRAND: 125TH ANNIVERSARYthe Hunter’s Theater had shut down. The brothers leased the theater and renamed it The Gal-veston Theatre, which staged its first season in 1867.Decades later, Greenwall was leasing the Tremont Opera House, considered the first the-ater designed as an opera house in Texas. But when the owners refused to update the building, Greenwall didn’t renew the lease.Instead, in March 1894, he announced a new theater could be built for $100,000. He and a group of investors from New York pitched in $25,000, and asked several Galveston busi-ness leaders to provide the rest.“The story was that he did it in one day,” Patton said. “He got the money in one day. The arts have always been good for business.”About 10 months later, the new theater was ready for open-ing day on Jan. 3, 1895.Greenwall chose Frank Cox from New Orleans firm Cox Brothers to design the building and chose a spot on Postoffice Street where an ice house sat. Cox created a four-story theater with hotel rooms in what today is administrative office space.At the time, the stage was the largest in the state.Throughout its history, The Grand has been a roadhouse, meaning shows brought in their own props in materials, Patton said.One showing of “Ben-Hur” even brought in horses, Patton said.“They had the horses on a treadmill,” Patton said. “So they were running on a treadmill, facing the audience.”Some financial difficul-PHOTOS BY JENNIFER REYNOLDS | THE DAILY NEWS THE DAILY NEWS 11ties associated with the 1900 Storm led to The Grand’s sale in 1901, when Bertrand Adoue and Isaac Kempner bought the property.They didn’t replace the cupo-la lost in the 1900 Storm, but re-opened the theater by October 1901.“It also ended up as a place of healing for people,” Patton said.The Grand continued to change hands until 1924 when Atillio Martini changed the theater’s name to Martini and showed a combination of vaudeville and movies at the opera house.He later changed the name to State Theater after opening a new Martini theater.The opera house continued to struggle to attract audiences until 1974, when the Galveston County Cultural Arts Council purchased the theater.That year, the theater was list-ed in the National Register of Historic Places and a massive renovation began.By 1986, the theater had be-gun operating as a separate nonprofit, 1894 Inc.Today, after many changes in management, the theater is do-ing largely what it did 125 years ago, bringing in major stars, hosting local performances such as by the Galveston sym-phony and providing a venue for community gatherings, Pat-ton said.“That’s what we do today,” Patton said. “We literally are doing what this place was de-signed for back in 1894.” The Grand presents a variety of performances year-round, from Broadway and ballet to symphonies and country music concerts.THE SHOW MUST GO ON THE GRAND’S EARLY INVESTORS STEPPED UP TO SAVE STRUGGLING THEATER BY JOHN WAYNE FERGUSON | THE DAILY NEWS12 THE GRAND: 125TH ANNIVERSARYIn 1901, The Grand 1894 Opera House was in trouble.After opening to acclaim in 1895, the theater be-gan to be challenged by financial difficulties and in-creasing debts. Just one year into its existence, The Grand dissolved its board of directors and created the Galveston Grand Opera House Company.Not long after, however, the theater and the city of Galveston faced a greater challenge: the 1900 Storm.The Sept. 8 storm killed more than 6,000 people in Galveston and devastated large parts of the island. The storm badly damaged the theater, collapsing part of its roof and its back wall.Again facing a financial crisis, the theater was put up for auction in a sheriff’s sale in 1901.Were it not for the involvement of a group of local busi-nessmen — led by Bertrand Adoue and Isaac H. Kempner — the theater might not have survived that day.The men, representing a larger group of Galveston busi-nessmen, bought the theater for $5,000, a fraction of the cost it took to build it.Born in France, Adoue came to the United States at age 18, first living in New Orleans before coming to Texas. He moved to Galveston in 1874 and founded a cotton and banking business. He quickly established a large range of business interests. He was an executive of the three largest breweries in Texas and a member of the board of directors of A. H. Belo & Co., publishers of The Galveston Daily News and Dallas Morning News and the vice president of the company that owned the Hotel Galvez. He also was one of the original investors in The Grand.Isaac Kempner was a millionaire investor, and son of Harris Kempner, one of the island’s most powerful men in the city’s early days. When The Grand opened, Isaac Kempner was just 21 and had just starting to take over the family enterprises. He would go on to become the mayor of Galveston and to establish the Imperial Sugar Co. in Sugar Land.The investment was the latest in a series that sustained The Grand in its early years.The theater was built by Henry Greenwall, a German theater manager who moved to Galveston in 1837.To build the theater, Greenwall raised $75,000 from a group of islanders including Leon Blum, a dry-goods wholesaler; R.B. Hawley, a merchant and eventual state representative; J.C. League, the owner of the land that eventually became League City; foundry owner C.B. Lee; and Morris Lasker, a banker and real estate company owner.Other early investors included C.H. Moore, William Parr, and George and John Sealy.Over the next century, The Grand would continue to be acquired by various people, including Jack E. Pearce, the manager of the Hotel Galvez, and Attilio Martini, who would convert and update the theater to show movies.While the ownership might have changed, the legacy of those early owners continued to be felt throughout the decades.In 1980, a member of the Adoue family donated $25,000 to the opera house to restore parts of the opera house.To this day, the Kempner family has continued to sup-port the opera house by sponsoring performances and providing the Kempner name to an annual award given to people who have contributed to the enrichments of the community.The award is named after Leonora Kempner Thompson, who served on The Grand’s board of trustees for 38 years. THE DAILY NEWS 13ROSENBERG LIBRARYTheater Manager Henry Greenwall raised $100,000 — $25,000 from his own pocket and New York investors and the rest from island businessmen — to build The Grand. The ornate four-story structure built in the Romanesque Revival style housed a hotel, shops and an elegant theater. The building was topped with a cupola, which was destroyed in the 1900 Storm and never replaced.14 THE GRAND: 125TH ANNIVERSARY‘PART OF THE HEALING’RESILIENCY MARKS THE GRAND’S CHARACTERBY KATHRYN EASTBURN | THE DAILY NEWSTo a degree, the identity of the The Grand 1894 Opera House is tied up with disaster survival and a mission of getting back on its feet, no matter what.Built in 1894-95, The Grand enjoyed five years of prosperity before getting knocked down by the 1900 Storm on Galveston Island, the na-tion’s most lethal hurricane.But with community support and a will to serve its people, The Grand was back on its feet in just a little over a year, in October 1901.PHOTOS FROM ROSENBERG LIBRARYThe Grand sustained major damage in the 1900 Storm, which killed an estimated 6,000 people and destroyed a third of Galveston’s buildings.16 THE GRAND: 125TH ANNIVERSARY“I feel it went up quickly because people needed a place to go,” said Maureen Patton, The Grand’s executive director, who saw the opera house through major damage and recovery after Hurricane Ike in 2008.The Grand had withstood other storms — hurricanes Carla and Alicia, notably — but with Ike it endured its second nearly deadly blow.Patton said her staff was prepared for Ike because of Hurricane Rita in 2005, a massive post-Katrina hurricane aimed at Galveston Island that turned eastward at the last minute.“It was a hurried evacuation,” Patton said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen; we expected to come back and find the island was gone.”But watching television from a daughter’s home on the main-land, Patton could see that Galveston and The Grand were just fine.“What I realized is that we were not prepared to deal with an evacuation and a storm,” she said.Motivated by the experience of Rita, Patton and her staff mo-bilized, first creating a red book to be kept and used in the event of an emergency. The red book included insurance pa-pers, bank account records, staff contacts, lists of contractors and associates, everything the staff would need to get started on reconstruction in the event of a storm that required evacuation, Patton said.“We made a pretty good plan,” she said. “Rita was a blessing, a wake-up call.”By the time Ike hit, the staff’s plans were pretty well in place. Patton knew where everyone was going, how to contact them, even their car make and model and license numbers.“When we evacuated for Ike, we arranged our offices and cov-ered everything in plastic in case the windows broke,” Patton said. “The server from the box office was moved to an upper floor.” The plan was to chain together the big front doors facing Postoffice Street, but in the hurry of leaving, the doors were left unchained.The Grand’s season was just getting ready to start when Ike Hurricane Ike in September 2008 caused $6.5 million in damage to The Grand. Crews worked up to the night before installing new seats and polishing brass railings to ready the historic theater for its 114th birthday celebration, less than four months after the storm. THE DAILY NEWS 17arrived on Sept. 13, 2008, filling the theater with water and taking off part of the roof, leaving the venerable old building with $6.5 million in damage.Water rushed in through the back side of the building and cas-caded out the front, throwing open the doors that, had they been chained, would have held it back.Patton and her staff set to work quickly, and within 96 days had the theater back up and running.“I said, if we’re closed for a year, we’ll be out of business,” she said. “The core staff was intact. We needed to be ready, not necessarily finished.”The Grand had cash on hand from a fundraising season to start construction, while Development Director Virginia Weber, who’d previously worked for a builder, became the resident expert on FEMA recovery funding, maintaining meticulous records of ev-ery penny spent, every construction detail, every nail, latch and screw purchased. It took 10 years for Weber to close out FEMA inspections and reimbursement.Patton busied herself in the fall calling patrons, reaching out to ticket holders and offering them refunds or asking them to donate purchased tickets back to the theater.“I had to call all the booking agents and move our planned fall events up to the spring,” Patton said. “We refunded over $200,000 in tickets and we had $20,000 worth of tickets donated back to us.”Everyone working at The Grand had damage at home to deal with as well, and at work, major inconveniences such as defunct elevators and offices moved to the third floor of the building made for tough going.“It’s hard to think about how cheerful we were,” Patton said.On Jan. 3, 2009, The Grand held an open house for its birthday and 2,000 people came through. A Jerry Jeff Walker show was scheduled and quickly sold out.“I think we did the same thing as happened after the 1900 storm,” Patton said. “People needed a place to go, to get away from all the destruction.“We were a part of the healing.” PHOTOS BY JENNIFER REYNOLDS | THE DAILY NEWSGRAND NEWS18 THE GRAND: 125TH ANNIVERSARYCongratulations THE GRAND 1894 OPERA HOUSE125 Years Follow us on Social MediaOffice Located at Pirates Beach1.409.737.5200 13450 FM 3005Pictured: Darlene Stewart, Mike Cokins, Diana Casey, Davy Herrin, Diane Moore,David Herrin, Lynn Winget, Susan Cahill, Curtis McLauchlin and Terry Rizzo. BUYING or SELLING?Let Us Put Our Expertise to work for you!Celebrating 22 years in Galveston and 55 years in business!Touching lives one Home at a timeNext >