Kil’s Colosseum

Kil’s Colosseum stood in Munich’s Glockenbachviertel along Kolosseumstraße, stretching from Hans-Sachs-Straße to Ickstattstraße. It was a vast wooden hall built in 1872 by Franz Kil to host variety shows, acrobatics, operettas and even boxing matches. The main dance floor regularly hosted carnival balls that drew crowds of up to 4 000 people. The theatre offered tiered seating with boxes, stalls and a small ‘noble gallery’. Prices ranged from half a gulden for gallery seats to six kreuzer for the cheapest wooden places. In 1886 artists created a winter festival with artificial snow and ice-skaters gliding through the hall. A fire in 1881 killed nine performers, seven of them students from the Academy of Fine Arts. After the Second World War the building was repaired and reopened in 1947. By 1958 it had closed and was demolished in 1961. Today a modern block occupies the site, but the street name remains as a reminder of Munich’s vanished pleasure palace.