Construction began in 1914 on the site of former Turkish baths, and the Tivoli opened its doors in May 1915. The architect was Henry E. White, one of Australasia's most prolific theatre designers, who gave it an Art Nouveau interior across three levels with a facade of Oriental influence overlooking Albert Square. Inside, an air plant pumped ice-cold air through the auditorium - a genuine luxury in subtropical Brisbane. But the masterstroke was overhead. A rooftop garden theatre, open-sided for ventilation with steel shutters to hold off the rain, gave summer audiences somewhere cooler to sit, and smoking was permitted up there among the night air. With two entrances and two stages, the building could run two productions at once for two separate crowds.

The opening bill set the tone: the Tivoli Follies in the main auditorium and a vaudeville production on the roof. Both were staged by Hugh D. McIntosh, a showman and promoter influential in the Rickard Tivoli circuit that carried variety entertainment across Australia. Vaudeville was Brisbane's mass entertainment in that era - comedy, song, acrobatics and satire stitched into a single night - and the Tivoli was its premier Brisbane house. It was not without rivals. The nearby Empire Theatre, also on Albert Street, regularly drew bigger crowds, and the two houses competed for the city's appetite for spectacle. Then the ground shifted beneath live theatre altogether. As the Great Depression bit in the 1930s and variety audiences thinned, survival meant filling those 1,800 seats with cinema patrons to recover costs, and renovations to the foyer and auditorium followed in 1935. The roof garden, conceived for the breeze of a vaudeville summer, now sheltered moviegoers.

The end came not from fire or failure but from town planning. The Brisbane City Council bought the Tivoli in 1963 and closed it in 1965, as part of a sweeping plan to create King George Square on the ground opposite City Hall. The development demanded the demolition of a whole block of buildings - Centennial Hall and the Hibernian Building among them - and after four years standing dark, the Tivoli came down in 1969. A theatre that had chilled its air and opened its roof to the stars was levelled into open paving. The grandest variety palace Brisbane had built simply ceased to exist. Today the only trace of its programs survives in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland - paper memories of shows whose stage is now a place where people merely cross the square.

Yet the Tivoli endured in spirit. Across the river of decades, the name resurfaced on a different building entirely - a former bakery and factory in Costin Street, Fortitude Valley, reborn in 1989 as a theatre and restaurant and now one of Brisbane's most beloved live-music venues, where local and international acts fill a room of well over a thousand. It is not the Albert Street Tivoli, and never was the same place. But the persistence of the name is its own kind of monument: proof that a city which paved over its grandest variety palace could not quite let the word 'Tivoli' fall silent.