DeGive's Opera House

The Atlanta History Center describes how Belgian consul Laurent DeGive purchased an unfinished building at the corner of Marietta and Forsyth and hired architect and civil engineer Max Corput to design the opera house.

[1] The opera house opened on January 24, 1870, [2] and was expanded in 1873–1874 to accommodate over 2,000 people.

Earlier confusion about the location of the original DeGive's stems from two misunderstandings.

[5] Second, it had been assumed that the location may have been on at the corner of Marietta and Broad (not Forsyth) based on Reed's History of Atlanta.

[6] However, this reference is only to Atlanta's antebellum Masonic Hall, later destroyed in a fire in May, 1866.

DeGive Opera House building toward the end of its life, doing business as the Bijou Theater