Ornamental cherubs, still wet with fresh paint, looked down on the otherwise gutted lobby of the Garden Theater in early July as the space underwent a summer facelift.
Even amid the disarray, the decorative moldings still evoked the Vaudeville era in which the theater was born.
For the past decade and a half, The Short North Stage theater company has presented professional musicals at The Garden, but over the years, the building has been many things.
Now, it's the answer to a question. A listener wrote to WOSU's Curious Cbus looking for more information about the theater where her grandmother once worked as a seamstress for a burlesque show.
That was one major chapter in The Garden's life, but it wasn't the first, explained Short North Stage co-founders Peter Yockel and his husband, Rick Gore.
The Garden's beginnings
“You know, it started life out as a stable," Yockel said.
The original archway for carriages is now bricked in and serves as the backdrop for a large mural of coy fish on Wall Alley.
Gore said the building may next have been an opera house, since parts of the stage seemed to be older than the rest of the theater. A fire probably destroyed the roof, since bricks on the southwest corner of the building change color where they've been heated to extreme temperatures.
"We can find no written evidence of (the fire). The first real written evidence comes from in 1920 when it was reopened as a combination vaudeville and silent movie house," Gore said. "And that's how we have The Garden."
A blossoming venue
The theater drew audiences in with its garden-like atmosphere created by the orchestra pit full of shrubs and a massive, primitive “Swamp Cooler” air conditioner which still sprawls in the basement.
The Garden was the second theater in Ohio to have air conditioning, Yockel said.
The theater attracted many popular acts. Yockel believes that the silent movie star Louise Brooks may have visited while on tour with the Denishawn Dance Company in the early 1920s. A stagehand who loved to draw on the walls sketched a woman with Brooks' signature bob and wideset eyes.
"We don't really know," Dionysia Williams Velazco, associate artistic director for the Short North Stage, said as she pointed her phone flashlight at the drawing backstage. "It's lore, you know?"
The Ethel Miles years
Shortly after Louise Brooks may or may not have performed at the Garden, the theater's original owner died.
"It was rumored that he died in the arms of his mistress in one of the apartments that he kept for her in the High Street building," Yockel said.
The owner's widow decided to sell the building to 26-year-old Ethel Fallows (later Ethel Miles), who played the organ for the silent films.
Yockel said that was 1929 — the beginning of the Great Depression. Ethel was a young woman and would never get a bank loan. So the widow struck a deal. Ethel would pay the widow $500 a year for the rest of her life and the widow would leave the theater to her in her will.
The widow lived for decades, so Ethel Miles ended up paying quite a lot for the building, Yockel said. That didn't stop Miles from becoming one of the first self-made millionaires in central Ohio.
She acquired more properties in the state, but continued to run The Garden as her flagship theater until her death in the late 1960s. By that time, the entertainment industry — and the Short North neighborhood — had begun to change.
"Basically, vaudeville died," Gore said. "And so it became a movie house for the neighborhood. It was very well known and admired in that part of the Short North in Columbus. But that was until the 60s."
'Columbus' only burlesque theater'
As the Short North deteriorated, movie goers headed toward the suburbs.
“So, they turned it into one of the old-fashioned Gypsy Rose Lee type of burlesque houses," Gore said.
Remnants of the era can be found in the bowels of theater. Williams Velazco lead the way into a narrow, tunnel-like room in the basement that used to be a men's bathroom. Crude drawings and notes cover the walls.
“You can see that there are some interesting things that the men of the bathroom used to write when this was a burlesque house," Williams Velazco said.
By the mid-80s The Garden had become an X rated movie house and "entertainment parlor."
“That whole neighborhood at that time was, it was really run down and actually dangerous," Gore said.
A 1985 opinion piece in the Columbus Dispatch railed against crime in the neighborhood, pointing a finger right at The Garden.
“It is just old-fashioned common knowledge that ‘garbage cans’ attract flies. Remove the garbage and the flies leave, too," reads the editorial. "In one three-block area alone in this strip on N. High St. there are two strip joints including the only burlesque theater in town, the Garden Theater."
Not long after that piece was published, The Garden's operators were charged with promoting prostitution and the theater shut down.
For about a decade, the building sat empty. Then, the Garden Worship Center came along.
"I'd have to say they tried to drive the devil out," Gore said.
"The church was very evangelical. They would be on the street corner at 5th and High with signs asking people, 'are you saved?'" Yockel said.
The congregation stayed until 2007. By then, the theater’s risqué burlesque days were a distant memory.
But burlesque had never really died in Columbus.
Burlesque is alive and thriving
"We have a very robust scene here," said Lana Moy.
Moy, who is better known in the burlesque community by her stage name, Ms. DeMunchon, leads the Big Girl Burlesque troupe, which performs at various stages in the city.
Moy said that burlesque started as farce. It was a type of theater that used exaggeration to mock serious subjects like politics. It came to typically include striptease alongside humorous acts.
Today, removing clothing is the hallmark of burlesque. But Moy defines burlesque as “whatever you want to express.”
“Every single person in the troupe has a different route to showing us their joy on the stage," Moy said. "We may do it in a silly way or a fun way or a very sexy way that you may not be expecting to see."
Moy's dancers practice in members’ homes to save money. At one rehearsal, Lilac Rios, of Columbus, slips into a large black skirt with red frills.
She plays music off the TV in a dim living room in Reynoldsburg. As she dances, a cat tries to attack the skirt. Rios startles the cat away. Then she twirls and knocks over a few picture frames, causing her troupe mates to burst into laughter.
It's clear the process brings the group joy, even when things go a bit awry.
"It is not therapy, but it is a wonderful way to connect with your body and find things that maybe have been taken away from you or you didn't know you had access to," Moy said.
Moy describes a robust, diverse, and supportive burlesque community in central Ohio. But she said that burlesque is still sometimes demonized.
“I think mostly what people are afraid of are these ideas more than anything. They think that you're going to a strip club, which is a scary thing for a lot of people if you haven't been to one," Moy said.
She feels like the community is coming under ideological fire again. Moy worries about a so-called drag ban moving its way through the Ohio legislature that would limit where "adult cabaret" can be performed.
"It's very cyclical, and here we are again," Moy said.
Full circle
If burlesque has found its way full circle — for better or for worse — so has the historic Garden Theater.
When Yockel and Gore first toured the building years ago, it spoke to Yockel.
“It just kind of called out to us that it wanted to be a theater again," he said.
Short North Stage will kick off its 15th season in August with some fresh paint and revitalized spaces for the audience but the same great theater.
In some ways, everything the building has been has lead it to today. Williams Velazco noted that vaudeville was the predecessor of musical theater. Some of the great musicals are about burlesque.
"You know, they always say that theaters are haunted," Williams Velazco said.
Maybe the ghosts of vaudeville and burlesque performers look down on today's actors, glad that the theater is still alive.
