The Grand Opera House: Iron Lace and Masonic Secrets
Near Wilmington, Delaware
The building at eight eighteen North Market Street has been described as one of the finest surviving examples of nineteenth-century cast iron architecture in America. From the outside it looks almost lacy, columns and pediments and ornamental friezes cast in iron and bolted into place with Victorian precision. Look closely at the central pediment and you will see an all-seeing Eye of Providence, because the Grand Opera House began its life not as an arts venue but as a Masonic temple.
In eighteen sixty-nine, the Delaware Grand Lodge of Masons offered stock to fund a combination Masonic hall and performance space. The project cost one hundred thousand dollars, an enormous sum for the time. They hired a Baltimore architect named Thomas Dixon to design the building in Second Empire style, the same French-influenced mode popular in Washington and Paris after the Civil War. Dixon wove Masonic symbolism into every level of the facade.
The Grand opened in eighteen seventy-one to immediate success. That first season alone brought more than seventy performances, ranging from serious drama to lectures to minstrel shows, and reserved seats cost a dollar. Over the following decades the stage welcomed Ethel Barrymore, John Philip Sousa, Buffalo Bill Cody, Thomas Nast the political cartoonist, and the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, who performed here when most of the country's finest concert halls refused them.
The building fell on hard times in the twentieth century and was nearly demolished in the nineteen sixties when urban renewal threatened much of downtown Wilmington. A preservation campaign saved it, and today it serves as the state's premier performing arts venue. The cast iron facade, its Masonic eyes and columns still intact, faces a street that has changed almost completely around it.
