About Quizzes

Music Hall

The Music Hall is a late-19th century edifice located on 69 Lisbon Street, in Lewiston, Maine. It was a realization of the quest for “the best opera house east of Boston," after a freak fire devoured many stores along Lisbon Street – then a major commercial street – in the early 1870s. The new venture was designed by John Fox of Boston and the 1,300 seat house was formally opened by the then U.S. Representative William P. Frye on December 17, 1877. For a native of Lewiston, it was as grand to Maine as the Metropolitan was to New York. Maritana and Rose of Castile by the Boston English Opera Company, and the comedy Married Life by the Metropolitan Company, were the first performances to be staged in the hall. Soon several top-level traveling stock companies, minstrels, drama and melodrama troops, as well as outstanding musicians of the day followed suit and used this stage to display their artistic and creative talents to the public. However, in the 1930s, the hall started to lose business. It was still occasionally used for staging shows until some time in the 1960s, when a hardware store owner bought the entire premises and gutted the theater for storage space. The hall’s history as a showcase of culture and art ended then. Now a district court functions in the building.