Opera Houses
An important building type found across the state
Opera houses are a ubiquitous building type across upstate New York, appearing in small rural towns and villages, larger commercial centers, and bigger cities. Opera houses were an important part of community life in the 19th and early-20th centuries. The opera house was not only a venue for theater and cultural activities, but also functioned as the heart of a community and a gathering place to relax and socialize. These buildings range from very simple to highly decorative, but all are characterized by lower floor non-performance space with an upstairs auditorium, and often appear on main streets.
The Earlville Opera House is one of the state’s important historic opera house rehabilitation success stories. This 1892 three-story brick multi-use building boasts a proscenium stage, ornate stamped metal ceilings, and decorative stenciling. Saved from demolition in the 1970s, today it offers an art gallery and restored performance space that attract participants from far beyond its small community in rural Chenango County, NY. The League has been proud to support their preservation journey over the years with grants through the New York State Council on the Arts-funded Technical Assistance Grant (2014) and Preserve New York (2021) grant programs.
As small communities stopped housing traveling performers, many of the opera houses throughout upstate New York became vacant or building owners closed the auditorium level. In 2018, the League included “Opera Houses” on our biennial Seven to Save list of endangered historic sites. As we shared then, many opera houses are centrally located in a community and are therefore susceptible to demolition or insensitive commercial development. Current codes require creative solutions to bringing vacant upper-level auditoriums back to active use. However, there are several opera houses from around the state that have reopened their performance spaces and serve as examples for the many towns and villages with vacant or underutilized opera houses.
The Seven to Save designation strove to bring awareness to this threatened and disappearing building type. The League’s earlier program, Enhancing Main Street: Making Upper Floors Work Again, laid the groundwork. Since 2019, the League has been fortunate to receive support from the Arthur F. & Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation to fund our ongoing work around NYS opera houses. We are grateful to the Adams Foundation for their commitment to this work.
Thanks to a grant from the Adams Foundation in 2019, the League was able to create a crowd-sourced inventory of historic opera houses in New York State, providing good data to understand the number of extant opera houses and their current conditions. You can explore this map below.
Following the Opera House Survey, the Adams Foundation partnered with the League in 2021 to fund a comprehensive Building Condition Report for Paramount Lodge in Buffalo, NY. Completed by our colleagues at Preservation Buffalo Niagara and BAC/Architecture + Planning, PLLC, their extensive historic research produced a detailed Determination of National Register Eligibility as part of the report. Read more about the project here.
In 2022, the Adams Foundation proposed a re-grant partnership to fund the rehabilitation, restoration, and repair of historic arts and cultural venues, open to organizations that previously received League grants. The League was thrilled to award both Earlville Opera House and Hubbard Hall Center for the Arts and Education. You can find the announcement of that grant award here.
Mapped: Opera Houses Across NYS
Notes From the Field: Opera Houses
The Arthur F. & Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, created in 1985, honors its founders, Mr. & Mrs. Adams, by supporting the arts, culture, humanities, and education.