The Grand Opera House was an opera house

Opera house

An opera house is a theatre building used for opera performances that consists of a stage, an orchestra pit, audience seating, and backstage facilities for costumes and set building...

 and concert hall located in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

.

Opened in 1874 on Adelaide Street West, west of Yonge Street, the Grand Opera House was Toronto's premier concert hall during the late 19th century. Designed in the Second Empire style with 1750 seats, the hall was the first in the city to feature gaslights that could all be switched on or off simultaneously with one electric switch. The Grand Opera House's stage hosted some of the era's best-known performers, including actors Maurice Barrymore

Maurice Barrymore

Herbert Arthur Chamberlayne Blythe —stage name Maurice Barrymore — was the patriarch of the Barrymore acting family and great-grandfather of actress Drew Barrymore.-Early life:...

, Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...

 and Sir Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...

, soprano Emma Albani

Emma Albani

Dame Emma Albani DBE was a leading soprano of the 19th century and early 20th century, and the first Canadian singer to become an international star. Her repertoire focused on the operas of Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Wagner...

, as well as Italian baritones Giuseppe Del Puente and Antonio Galassi. Visiting lecturers included Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

. During its initial years, the Grand Opera House was managed by Charlotte Morrison, a former actress, and the guiding force at that time behind Toronto's opera and theatre scenes. Morrison has been described as the "Ed Mirvish

Ed Mirvish

Edwin “Honest Ed” Mirvish, OC, CBE was a Canadian businessman, philanthropist and theatrical impresario who lived in Toronto, Ontario...

 of her time".

The Grand Opera House suffered a number of fires, including a major blaze in 1879 that killed a stage-carpenter, as well as his wife and infant daughter. Although the hall was restored and reopened after each fire, it slowly fell into neglect with the arrival of the vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 age in the 1900s, which brought with it newer and more modern vaudeville theatres to Toronto, most notably the Loews and Winter Garden Theatres

Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres

The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres are a pair of stacked theatres in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Winter Garden theatre is seven stories above the Elgin Theatre....

 on Yonge Street.

In 1919, the Grand Opera House became embroiled in an infamous and widely reported criminal investigation. On December 2, the Grand Opera House's owner at the time, Ambrose Small

Ambrose Small

Ambrose Joseph Small was a Canadian theatre magnate, who owned theatres in several Ontario cities including the Grand Opera House in Toronto, the Grand Opera House in Kingston, and the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario. More notably, he is a famous Canadian missing person...

, deposited a cheque for a million dollars in a nearby bank, and went missing later that day. Before his disappearance, Small already had a reputation in Victorian

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

 Toronto as a gambler, and booked less reputable, more titillating shows to his string of theatres, including the Grand Opera House. The newspapers published every known detail of the police investigation into his disappearance, and soon it was revealed that Small had kept a secret sex room at the Grand Opera House, where he entertained numerous mistresses. The scandal further tarnished the Grand Opera House's standing in a strait-laced city then known as the Methodist Rome

Methodist Rome

Methodist Rome was a nickname sometimes given to the city of Toronto, Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The moniker implied that Toronto was as central to Canadian Methodism as Rome, or more specifically Vatican City in Rome, is to Catholicism.Methodism was never the...

.

The concert hall never recovered from the fires, the neglect and the scandal, and it was unceremoniously demolished in 1927. The site of the former Grand Opera House is now occupied by the 68-storey Scotia Plaza

Scotia Plaza

Scotia Plaza is a Postmodern commercial office complex in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The complex is situated in the financial district of the downtown core, and is generally bordered by Yonge Street on the east, King Street West on the south, Bay Street on the west, and Adelaide Street...

 in Toronto's Financial District

Financial District, Toronto

The Financial District is a business district in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, within the downtown core. It was originally planned as New Town in 1796 as an extension of the Town of York . It is the main financial district in Toronto, and is the financial heart of Canada...

. The sole remaining physical legacy of the concert hall is a small lane running south from Adelaide Street West, named "Grand Opera Lane".