Tag archives: Jose Lobero

by Hercule Beresford Italian-born Giuseppe (José) Lobero loved his adopted country so much that he opened his opera house, the first theater in Santa Barbara, on February 22, George Washington’s birthday. With such deep patriotic sentiment, it seems likely that it was he who hung a symbol of our nation above the proscenium arch of […]

With Valentine’s Day coming up, what did Jose Lobero (born Giuseppe in Genoa, Italy) love? He loved opera and in 1873 he built a theater to house that love. It began as an old wooden schoolhouse and became the largest adobe structure in California for its time, housing the only opera house south of San […]

When Jose Lobero expanded the old adobe Sebastopol schoolhouse and created his Opera House between 1871 and 1873, Chinatown was already established on the first block of East Canon Perdido street. At that time, the street was nothing more than a narrow dirt track and an article from November 1873 stated, “This narrow and disagreeable […]