In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places. Details are at http://www.maplecornermedia.com/inthisstate/.
From a hillside vantage on a bleak and blustery morning, Island Pond’s “opera block,” a building stripped of siding, on the lakeshore, looks derelict, a visage suggesting best days gone by.
The rambling once graceful building at 123 years looks nothing like it did on the day, circa 1900, when decked in red, white and blue it was the backdrop for the town’s celebration of William McKinley’s presidency.
This winter the white vinyl siding was removed and the wooden undersurface scarred and pockmarked was revealed.
One might ask: “Is this how you treat a beloved old building?” The answer is: Yes.
The artificial siding was stripped from the “opera block” this winter for a benevolent purpose: to allow architects to better understand the structure, and put out a request for bids for the renovation of the old theater.
This village in the Northeast Kingdom has decided to dress up the old building to help preserve it.
The project, says town administrator Joel Cope, aims to honor the tradition — and function — of a building, which along with the 600-acre pond and the stone and brick railway station, now a museum, are Island Pond’s dominant features. So far, Cope has found $515,000 to preserve the building.
As much as he appreciates local history, “this is a rehabilitation, not a restoration project,” Cope says.
From the beginning, before the phrase ever existed, the structure has been a multi-purpose building. From the get-go, residents have been borrowing books from the public library and money from the bank that were located there. For a while the edifice was home to the fire department.
Cavernous third-floor rooms, long ago abandoned, were once the meeting places for the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Order of Eastern Star, and other fraternal and sororal organizations. A peephole in one third-floor door suggests not everyone was cordially invited.
Residents with legal problems or hopeful about wills and estates went to the lawyer’s office or appeared before a judge on the second floor. A shingle out front tells residents the building remains the location of the probate court.
And first and foremost, the opera block had a spacious auditorium: for town-wide meetings, concerts, plays and eventually sports, especially basketball. Until the late 1960s, when the village and surrounding town of Brighton still had its own high school, the opera block was home court for the Bearcats, a team of statewide renown.
As often is true in small towns, one person can make things happen. That’s been the case in Island Pond.
“Joel is the guy who got it started by finding all the grants, so he really is the center of it all,” says Virginia Wing, a member of the local historical society, who has fond memories of the building. Wing was a Bearcats cheerleader in the ‘60s in the auditorium and a volunteer waitress at high school alumni banquets in the third-floor dining room.
“I think the town is pretty much supportive of what’s going on,” Wing says. Though “some angst was expressed” when the siding was torn off during the coldest time of the year, she said.
“There’s lots of history and personal ties, and that’s why people are supportive,” says Melinda Gervais-Lamoureux, head of the select board, which unanimously supports the project.
“The staple memories for me were the talent shows, one in which I appeared in a little tutu,” she reports. “And, of course, there was the basketball.”
So far, the project hasn’t been too costly to local taxpayers. On his treasure hunt, Cope has found more than $400,000 from various non-local sources, including the Preservation Trust of Vermont, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Vermont Community Development Program and the Sen. Leahy Village Revitalization Initiative.
The town chipped in $50,000, and the Passumpsic Savings Bank, with a branch on the building’s ground floor, added $5,000.
In a time of tight money, who, locally, could complain?
Though it’s unlikely any opera was performed in the building, the structure was called an opera house (later the opera block) because that’s what music halls and buildings housing them were called in northern New England back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They sprouted in many Vermont communities as venues of entertainment and community pride. In fact, a half-dozen with origins in that time period still exist, restored and attracting audiences — in Barre, Vergennes, Randolph, Enosburg Falls, Derby Line, even in tiny Hyde Park.
Musical performances, lectures, vaudeville acts, minstrel shows, silent films and the early talkies were part of the opera house scenes in these towns, as well as in Island Pond. But that was in the days when Island Pond was still a booming railroad hub between Montreal and Boston.
The Chautauqua Movement of New York sent entertainers and speakers to Island Pond for programs lasting weeks at a time, reports John Carbonneau, now a Florida resident who founded the Island Pond Historical Society. Harry Houdini performed his magic on the stage and big-band leader and crooner Rudy Vallee, an Island Pond native, made a splash appearance in 1932.
“He and his orchestra were invited to play in town during the Depression, and he performed two or three times in the hall for free, while leaving money for the poor,” says Carbonneau. “It was a highlight in my age.”
For now, the opera-block rehab goals remain modest and practical. The place is getting new siding, wooden clapboards, which may be expensive; insulation has been added to attic and basement; new third-floor windows have been installed; the third-floor rooms may get a complete facelift. Most likely, several of the seven two-story windows that once graced the auditorium will be reinstalled, though that, of course, would require screening to stop errant basketballs.
Cope would like to see the stage moved and acoustical buffers of some sort installed. “At town meeting someone will stand to speak, and no one can hear,” he says.
Cope, tieless, wearing an unbuttoned herringbone jacket and felt slippers in his office, a half loaf of multi-grain bread on his desk, appears relaxed, but it’s clear he is on a mission. In a perfect world, improvements at the historic opera block might inspire others, including businesses, in the neighborhood to make building improvements, which could boost community spirit and draw visitors.
For now, his goal is less grandiose: “Enhance the social and cultural use of this building.”
Dirk Van Susteren of Calais is a freelance writer and editor.
