The Bird Cage Theatre
Near Tombstone, Arizona
The plain adobe building on the corner here was once the most notorious room in the Arizona Territory. The Bird Cage Theatre opened at Christmastime in eighteen eighty one, run by a variety performer named Billy Hutchinson and his wife Lottie. Hutchinson had hoped to bring respectable family entertainment to Tombstone, but the rough mining crowd wanted something wilder, and the Bird Cage gave it to them.
It ran as a theater, saloon, gambling hall, and house of prostitution, all under one roof, night and day. The name comes from about a dozen small compartments, or cribs, that hung from the ceiling along the walls, draped in curtains, where women entertained paying men above the crowd. A poker game in a back room was said to run continuously for years without ever closing.
The New York Times is said to have called the Bird Cage the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast. If you doubt it, look at the walls and ceiling. They are still pocked with bullet holes, said to number around one hundred forty from the shooting that went on inside.
When Tombstone's mines flooded and the silver ran out around the turn of the eighteen nineties, the Bird Cage simply locked its doors, which helped preserve it as one of the best kept relics of the frontier.
