Olympic Theatre (1866)

This earlier Olympic Theatre building rose three stories beneath a mansard roof lined with dormer windows. A cast-iron arcade of round-arched openings ran across the ground floor, sheltering the entrance beneath a projecting marquee lettered OLYMPIC; a perpendicular blade sign reading OLYMPIC hung over the sidewalk between two ornamental cast-iron lamp standards. Iron-railed balconies spanned the second and third floors above the arcade.

This building was St. Louis's Olympic Theatre before it was replaced in 1882 by a larger building on the same site. Sources disagree on the opening year, giving either 1866 or 1867. Actress E. J. Phillips performed here as part of Ben DeBar's stock company; in an 1893 letter recalling a later engagement, she described returning to "the old Olympic" and noted that the Southern Hotel, at Fourth and Walnut, stood "just opposite" the theater. A photograph dated 1874 (Missouri History Museum, item N34777, by Emil Boehl) shows the theater as a freestanding three-story building with a mansard roof, standing next to a separate St. James Hotel building -- the two were later combined into one structure when the theater was rebuilt in 1882. The theater operated until 1881, when its owner decided to replace it with an updated building on the same site.