Tabor Opera House Leadville Sawatch Range Ceramic Art Tile
— — the room the silver built.
Not only on a wall.
“Built in 1879 by Horace Tabor, the silver baron who made Leadville for a season. Three stories of brick on Harrison Avenue, 880 seats under a painted ceiling, the boards still bearing the marks of Oscar Wilde and Houdini and John Philip Sousa. The town sits at 10,152 feet — the highest incorporated city in North America — with the Sawatch Range and Colorado's two tallest peaks lined up to the west. The silver boom ended; the opera house did not. The room has been kept, not restored — the velvet rubbed thin, the gas-jets converted, the original drop-curtain still hanging.
Tabor Opera House Leadville Sawatch Range Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Tabor Opera House sits on Harrison Avenue in Leadville, Colorado, at 10,152 feet — the highest incorporated city in North America. The building is the work of Horace Tabor, the silver baron whose claims at the Little Pittsburg and Matchless mines made him, briefly, one of the richest men in the West. Construction took roughly 100 days in 1879, and the room originally seated 880. Leadville rose on the eastern flank of the Sawatch Range, the Colorado spine that holds Mount Elbert (14,440 feet) and Mount Massive (14,428 feet) — the two highest peaks in the Rocky Mountains.
Three stories of brick designed by J. Thomas Roberts, the building rose in roughly 100 days in 1879. The interior carries gas-jet fixtures later converted to electric, a horseshoe balcony, and the original hand-painted drop-curtain showing the Royal Gorge at the proscenium. Oscar Wilde lectured here in April 1882, in the middle of his American tour; Anna Held, John Philip Sousa, and Harry Houdini followed in the decades after. The room has been preserved rather than restored — the velvet rubbed thin in places, the floors worn by a century of programs.
The Opera House sits at 308 Harrison Avenue, in Leadville's small grid of nineteenth-century brick blocks. The City of Leadville purchased the building in 2016 and now operates it through the Tabor Opera House Preservation Foundation. The house opens for tours from late May into early October, when the high-altitude weather lets the building breathe; winter operation is limited by the cold and a heating system inherited from a previous century. Performances still happen on the original stage, often clustered around the annual Boom Days weekend in early August. From Denver it is roughly a hundred miles west, on the eastern flank of the Sawatch.