Lincoln’s Adult Novelty Store

a historical detective story

The first task when examining Wilde’s tour of America is to establish the location for his lectures.

In this case, it is the lecture which took place on April 24, 1882 in the city ofLincoln, the state capital of Nebraska.

The few contemporary newspaper reports that exist of Wilde’s lecture in Lincoln name ‘City Hall’ as the venue, although one report cites the (lower case) ‘opera house’. Neither of these is entirely wrong, but neither alone allows us to be definitively correct.

Confusion arises if one takes City Hall to mean Lincoln’s first City Hall (or its more recent alternative name ‘Old City Hall’), a building extant at 920 O Street. Completed 1879 as a Post Office and Courthouse, it later served as the seat of the Lincoln city government for 62 years. 

However, on his American tour, Wilde typically did not lecture in municipal office buildings, and, besides, City Hall did not house an auditorium. So we can rule out this City Hall (above).

The report of an opera house, however, would appear to indicate that, as usual, Wilde did lecture in a theater setting. But if it were an opera house, which one would it be? It could not have been the main Opera House in Lincoln (formerly Hallo’s and later Funke Opera House), because that venue was engaged on the night of Wilde’s lecture by a troupe of minstrels.

So, for over a century, the scant evidence has been unconvincing, and Wilde’s lecture venue in Lincoln remained unknown or misinterpreted. It is only following recent demolition work in Lincoln, that it is possible to identify the location here for the first time.

Hot Property

The road to discovery begin in December 2010, with a fire that destroyed an entire lot at 941 O Street in Lincoln.

The premises was known as the Romantix Building, and currently housed an adult novelty store (one of a chain of 50 such stores across the region). So far, the cause of the fire remains (suspiciously) undetermined.

It was at this point that in stepped Ed Zimmer, Historic Preservation Planner at the Lincoln/Lancaster County Planning Dept., to examine the structure revealed by the fire. Ed knew that the building once had some connection with City Hall, but he assumed that its role had been to serve as offices where government records had been kept.

But the building was merelyfor office space, why then, upon inspection, were the upper two floors revealed to be, in fact, one single floor with a high ceiling? Could it be that the inevitable modifications to the facade that made the structure unrecognizable for more than a century, had also masked its original use? 

A search of the archives for pictures of the original building proved instructive. For instance, in this rare photograph of the 900 block of O Street around the time of Wilde’s visit, note the light-colored building with a flagpole at mid-block, which stands at the site of the 2010 fire.

The longtime owner of this c.1878 building was Frederick (Fred) Schmidt, a dry goods merchant, who was an early developer in Lincoln.

The structure provided commercial use on the ground floor, and, as Ed had suspected when revealed by the fire, a taller upper floor evidenced by the two-story height windows. But it was only when Ed noticed the words CITY HALL on the ornament of the north facing cornice, that the meaning became clear.

This had not been a “city hall”, nor a branch of it, in the sense of a municipal building after all. The name ‘hall’ had designated a music or concert hall.

Joining Forces

The Lincoln Planning Department, font of local Greek neoclassicism though they may be, is no Oscar Wilde symposium, so no inferences were drawn.

But when I learned of Ed’s conclusions about the discovered city hall a collaboration was inevitable. We put two and two together, and began to explain the conundrum of Wilde’s “too-too” lecture venue was in a place at once a theater and a City Hall. This made sense particularly given that Wilde’s previous two lectures had been at the similarly-named Liberty Hall in Lawrence, and Corinthian Hall in Atchison.

The City Hall Theatre

So to the record books.

I discovered that by 1880, the Lincoln city directory noted the building stood on O Street opposite the government post office under the proprietorship of Schmidt and Jones, housing, it said, “City Hall, with a seating capacity of 1,000 used for all sorts of public purposes.” These activities, it transpired, would have included dances of The Pleasant Hour Club, and, later, productions of The People’s Theatre.

And the continued association of Schmidt, the building’s original owner, also turned up this old clipping from my files into in a nicely circular piece of corroboration:

Wilde Fire

Many of Wilde’s lecture halls were destroyed by fire quite early in their lives—and not many remain.

But Lincoln City Hall survived for well over a hundred years, during which time the building extended its commercial activities on three floors, with occupants including Schmidt Dry Goods, The Union Pacific Tea Company, Grand Leader Department Store, Simon Galter’s Men’s Furnishings, and the Golden Eagle Department Store. It took until the building was an adult novelty store before succumbing to the same fiery fate.

A word about Ellmann

In the definitive, but flawed, biography Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann (p. 202) it says that “Wilde lectured at the Presbyterian Road Church in Lincoln.” Ellmann is wrong. There was no Presbyterian Road in Lincoln, and Ellmann’s false reasoning, and more about the location, can be found in my related web site feature: Not That City Hall.

© John Cooper, 2015.

Related:

Wilde’s address at Lincoln State University

Journal Star (Lincoln, NE) – Report of Fire

Journal Star (Lincoln, NE) – History

Lincoln, Nebraska interactive map