The Wheeler Opera House is located at the corner of East Hyman Avenue and South Mill Street in Aspen, Colorado, United States.

It is a stone building erected during the 1890s, from a design by Willoughby J. Edbrooke that blends elements of the Romanesque Revival and Italianate architectural styles.

Among the performers who have appeared at the Wheeler are Lily Tomlin, Renée Fleming, Phish, John Denver and Bill Maher.

To the south and east Hyman and Mill have been closed to vehicular traffic; both are now planted with shade trees and serve as pedestrian malls.

The surrounding neighborhood is densely developed with a mixture of modern and historic buildings, none taller than two stories, giving the Wheeler unchallenged domination of the skyline.

[5] The terrain is level, with the lower slopes of Aspen Mountain and the ski area's base facilities several blocks to the south.

Above them a small continuous cornice sets off a plain frieze with the word "Bank" in relief above the door on the corner facade.

Its windows are all trabeated single-pane double-hung sash with granite lintels and a broad plain surround; all except the center bays on the south are set in slight recesses that rise to an arched top on the third story.

The second story has back stage dressing rooms and the theater lobby, painted in Venetian plaster with a mural showing the building.

Established with much fanfare during the city's initial boom years in the late 19th century, it fell into decline along with much of the rest of Aspen's buildings when the silver market crashed.

First established in 1879 as Ute City, a rough settlement of log cabins on a plain high in the Roaring Fork Valley, Aspen grew quickly when silver was found in abundance in the nearby mountains.

[4] With the lucrative returns on his mining investments, he financed two monumental buildings that bear his name and remain standing: the Hotel Jerome, Aspen's most prominent landmark to travelers passing through on what is now State Highway 82, and the opera house, at the city's center.

[4] Denver architect Willoughby J. Edbrooke designed a building that combined a basic Romanesque Revival form with some Italianate decorative touches.

[4] The anticipation of its opening was such that local milliners ran advertisements in Aspen's newspapers telling customers they were too overwhelmed to take new orders.

The Wheeler became a stop on a popular touring route called the Silver Circuit, working its way from Denver through Leadville, over the Divide and through Aspen to Utah and eventually ending at Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Some burned, unattended and unextinguished, or succumbed to decay from the effects of an intense annual five-month winter at 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above sea level.

The Paepckes, instrumental in the rebirth of the city, attracted major cultural figures to it with a 1949 festival to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

This was part of what they called the "Aspen Idea": a community where residents could "earn a living, profit by healthy physical recreation, with facilities at hand for [their] enjoyment of art, music, and education.

While this was enough to allow Lowell George to make live radio broadcasts and an informal concert by folk musician Burl Ives, it was nowhere near what the theater needed, and due to structural concerns the only events it could host in wintertime were movie screenings.

This more comprehensive effort mixed elements of Bayer's Bauhaus background with the Victorian flourishes of Edbrooke's original design.

[4] Aspen's continued increase in popularity attracted more year-round residents, among whom were celebrities like John Denver and Goldie Hawn.

Kessler's modernist design, however, was ridiculed as an incongruous and unsympathetic "waving flag" and later dropped amid much community opposition.

Performers included pianist James Levine, cellist Lynn Harrell, the Denver Repertory Theatre Company and the MOMIX dance troupe.

As a link to the building's past as Aspen's major movie house, the 1928 silent film classic The Wind was shown, with full orchestral accompaniment and its star, Lillian Gish, by then 90, in attendance.

Audiences at productions in the mid-1980s were among the first to hear lyric soprano Renée Fleming when she was a student in the Music Festival's opera program.

[4] Standup comedy, coming into its own in the 1980s, helped put the reborn Wheeler on the national map when HBO chose it as the location for its annual U.S.

Well-established names in comedy also played the Wheeler—in the late 1980s, Lily Tomlin previewed her one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe there for six weeks before its Broadway opening.

[15] The transfer tax was renewed in 2000, and a strong local real estate market during the following decade left the Wheeler with $28 million in funds.

[17] The Wheeler was closed for most of the latter half of 2013 for long-needed renovations to its balcony area which will include a conversion of its movie technology from 35mm to full DCP (digital cinema projection), which was completed in time for its reopening in January 2014.

[20] The theater is available for rent for private and public occasions, except during the period from mid-June to mid-August when it is mostly used by the Music Festival's Opera School.