The Burtis-Kimball House Hotel and the Burtis Opera House were located in downtown Davenport, Iowa, United States. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. It has since been torn down and it was delisted from the NRHP in 2008. The theatre building has been significantly altered since a fire in the 1920s. Both, however, remain important to the history of the city of Davenport.
Burtis-Kimball House Hotel
The first phase of hotel construction in Davenport lasted from 1836, when the city was founded, until just before the Civil War. Most of these hotels were small and were located near the Mississippi River to take advantage of the passengers disembarking from the riverboats. The second phase marked the arrival of the railroad when the first bridge to cross the Mississippi was opened between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport in 1856. Two years later J.J. Burtis, who had operated the LeClaire House in Davenport, opened his own hotel. It had an entrance on the mainline of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. The hotel rose to prominence in 1861 when Iowa Governor Samuel Kirkwood made the hotel his Civil War headquarters as the telegraph lines did not extend any further west.
A new railroad bridge replaced the original one in 1872, and Burtis built a new hotel along the new mainline of the railroad at Fourth and Perry Streets in 1874. The block was already the site of the Burtis Opera House. The new hotel featured its own train platform as well as telephone, telegraph and an elevator. In 1880 the name of the hotel was changed to the Kimball House and it was advertised as the “largest and best hotel in Iowa.†After 1900 the Kimball House was eclipsed by the third phase of hotel building in the city that included the Hotel Davenport, the Blackhawk Hotel and the Hotel Mississippi.
The hotel was transformed into an apartment building and renamed the Perry Apartments and then the Vale Apartments. US President Ronald Reagan lived in the building when he worked for radio station WOC in 1932-1933. As time went on the building started to decline. While attempts were made to save it, the building had become structurally unsafe and was torn down in 1993.
Burtis Opera House
The Burtis Opera House was opened in Davenport in 1867 at 415 Perry Street. The theater could hold an audience of 1,600 and it was a widely used facility. Mark Twain spoke to a sold-out house on his “The American Vandal Abroad†tour in 1869. In March 1874 Susan B. Anthony lectured on the woman’s right to vote. Al Jolson performed on the stage years after he worked as a singing waiter at Brick Munro’s Pavilion in Bucktown. The Quad City Symphony Orchestra played its first concert as the Tri-City Symphony in the Burtis on March 29, 1916.
The Burtis was an elegant building constructed in the Second Empire style. It featured a mansard roof with heavily hooded dormer windows. A bracketed cornice defined the transition from roofline to wall elevation. A projecting pavilion with its own mansard roof contained the building’s main entrance in the center of the façade.
On April 26, 1921 an arsonist set fire to the building and it was largely destroyed. By 1925 the building had been rebuilt and it functioned as an office building that housed the General Outdoor Advertising Company. The building’s appearance was altered in the rebuilding process. The third story with its mansard roof, as well as the second floor, were not retained. The pilasters on the corners were shortened and a simple cornice was added across the top. The roof is flat and a raised parapet defines the main entrance. The arched windows that flanked the center pavilion were retained in an altered form. The buildings style now resembles the Classical Revival. The building stands on its own next to the raised railroad tracks since the Kimball House/Vale Apartments and the rail station have been torn down. The most recent business to occupy the structure was Tri-City Electric.
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