The Garman Theater and Hotel Do De
The Garman Hotel’s main staircase was badly charred and looked ready to crumble.Updated July 23, 2019 | By Matthew Christopher
The Garman Opera House and the Hotel Do De were adjoining properties in downtown Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Several other smaller businesses also occupied the space, including a restaurant called La Bella Trattoria, a bar, an inn, a hair salon, and several apartments. The historic Hotel Do De, originally the Garman House, was built by a jeweler named Daniel Garman in 1861. The hotel was rebuilt after a fire in 1887 and again after another fire in 1890, which is when the Garman Opera House was added.
The Garman Opera House opened in 1890 with Daniel’s son William Garman as the manager, and according to the Bellefonte Historical Association “was host to the likes of George Burns and Gracie Allen, Houdini, the Flora Dora Girls, and a myriad of Wild West and one-act shows” in addition to being the first place the song “After the Ball is Over” was performed for the public. The theater had both electric and gas lighting and could seat 950 patrons. With the advent of cinema the opera house was also used as a single screen theater showing silent films and talkies and was renamed The State Theater in 1931. The State Theater had a difficult time competing with multiplexes in the late 1950s and closed in 1961. For a period of roughly 30 years it was used as a warehouse for an area furniture business but a progression of several local business owners rehabilitated it first into a theater for plays in the late 1990s, and then as a 400 seat movie theater in 2000. The La Bella Trattoria restaurant and a 10 room inn were added in 2005-2006, and plans were to add an IMAX movie theater. Unfortunately, the Garman Opera House was unsustainable as a business and closed again in 2008.
The Hotel Do De remained open, as did the bar on the first floor. On September 9, 2012 a fire that was later ruled arson broke out, gutting the building and leaving 18 families without a home or their possessions as it was too unstable for them to return to retrieve them. Luckily nobody died in the fire. According to a local newspaper, neither the Garman Opera House or the Hotel Do De had sprinklers.
I was able to arrange with Progress Development Group (PDG) to photograph the site before it was torn down in January 2014. When I entered the property I was unprepared for how bad it truly was. In the Garman Opera House, La Bella Trattoria, and the inn/apartments, black and white mold coated literally every surface of the building. The black mold was on walls, doors, mirrors, chairs, lights – but the while mold was in everything, blooming out of cracks and corners and rippling across the ceilings in foul upside-down pools. The PDG representative said they had consulted several firms and had been told that “all organic matter with mold on it would have to be removed and replaced.”
I didn’t see anything anywhere that appeared salvageable. I am not an expert in mold abatement but if what the PDG representative told me was true, it seemed very probable that every surface and beam of the buildings would have to be removed and replaced, a very expensive proposition for a business that had characteristically been unable to sustain itself as a theater to begin with. Even from across the street, the building smelled like death, and going inside the dark, moist cavern of the Opera House felt like entering the mouth of some hostile organism that was just waiting to infect you with its own wretched disease. The Opera House itself was beautiful, but it was very clear that the year or so without adequate roofing had all but destroyed it.
The Hotel Do De had fared much worse. The fire had obliterated the interior, blackening and twisting the items residents’ rooms and the bar below. The floors and walls were all but nonexistent, and the staircase was terrifying as you could feel the carbonized steps crunching under your feet. In a bedroom where two boys lived, a scorched piece of sheet music signed by Kurt Cobain still sat framed on the dresser. In others stacks, of DVDs had fused together and numbers had melted off microwaves. You don’t often see places that are truly untouched, but you could tell nobody had disturbed the items since the fire. You could also tell how much the blaze had cost the families that lived there.
The rooms in the Hotel Do De were still filled with heartbreaking reminders of the losses the families who lives there suffered.The community outcry over the demolition of the Garman Opera House and to a lesser extent the Hotel Do De were drowned out by the equipment tearing them down. The developer argued, and I’d be inclined to agree, that both buildings had been lost to the fire, that the following year of water damage had irreparably damaged the Opera House. I am almost always an advocate of preservation of some sort but I just didn’t see how it was possible, physically or economically.
What was clear, in the emails and comments I received later, was that both buildings had meant a tremendous amount to the community. The bar was a favorite haunt for townspeople and the Opera House was a place everyone had fond memories of and wanted to see put back to use. Unlike so many towns that are ready to cast off buildings the moment they are no longer functional, people really cared about them. It was a terrible loss, that much was certain.