From the beginning, when Phineas T. Barnum and Tom Thumb supposedly helped John and Mary Elitch open their gardens, performing arts were important to Denver's oldest and largest amusement park. Some of Denver's first moving pictures as well as summer stock theater played in this octagonal board-and-batten theater surrounded by a two-story porch. This all-wooden early example of the Western Stick Style has been closed since the 1980s. In 1995 Elitch's
moved into the Auraria neighborhood, to an expanded site along the South Platte River, leaving behind this landmark theater.