OUR TOWN
photo by stillman rogers
603 NAVIGATOR
Reinvented Rochester A mill town transforms into an arts center By Barbara Radcliffe rogers
I
’d like to be able to tell you that it was my fascination with New Hampshire’s early theaters and opera houses that drew me to Rochester. But it was a hamburger. We were passing through and hungry, so I checked my phone for something close to the 202/16 intersection. Wild Willy’s Burgers was just around the corner, and I found myself in the burger joint of my dreams, biting into a thick, juicy Rio Grande made from Pineland Farms natural beef. That was a few years ago, and since then I have actively sought routes that take us through Rochester at lunchtime. Burgers aside, Rochester’s Opera House is a worthy reason for visiting the city. In the post-Civil War era, when communities began building public performance spaces, the
20
nhmagazine.com | August 2020
word theater implied places of questionable morals. So these venues, which hosted everything from vaudeville shows to religious revivals, were euphemistically called opera houses. Rochester’s, built in 1908, combined the city hall with an auditorium worthy of a much larger city. The new venue had an impressive proscenium, a curved balcony, murals, stenciled walls and ceiling, and excellent acoustics. The highlight was a movable floor designed by the building’s architect George Gilman Adams, with a mechanism that could raise the back of the floor a full 36 inches for performances, lowering it to flat for dancing. It was a busy place for several decades, used for plays, musicals, public meetings, dances, high school graduations and
The Rochester Museum of Fine Arts commissioned Bianca Mireles to create this mural at the Rochester Community Center.
basketball games (for which the chandelier and windows were caged in chicken wire). But Spaulding High School opened in 1939 with its own auditorium, and movies drew crowds away from the live stage, so the Opera House slowly declined in use and condition until it finally closed. Attempts to restore it in the 1980s ran aground, but in 1996, a final drive brought volunteers and donations to fully restore the theater, replacing the fallen ceiling, uncovering painted-over stenciling, even repairing the unique floor, whose mechanisms had been unused and hidden for decades. Since its 1998 reopening, the theater has been an active cultural and community venue, hosting nationally known performers, a professional
