Souls in Transition: The Hudson Opera House, 1855–2005
by Andrew Rieser

A few years ago, my mother spent two weeks in England researching family roots. Her travels led to a small village that bore her family name. A shopkeeper directed her to the estate church and glebe, enclosed by a short iron fence with a gate. The wind-blown hillside appeared to be abandoned, so she opened the gate and walked inside, where generations of Mandevilles lived before mighty historical forces scattered them to 23 Maple Street, Summit, New Jersey.

After a few minutes of poking around, a woman appeared and asked what my mother was doing there. My mother explained, but the woman—a volunteer with the church in charge of the glebe—was officious and rude. The encounter devolved into a stand-off. As my mother explains, laughing at herself a bit, "I couldn't understand why she wanted me to leave my church!"

Europeans live inside their history and can take it for granted. But Americans are a diverse and highly mobile people, restless in our search for order. We look for it on the History Channel and E-Bay; we paste genealogies in scrapbooks and family trees. The PBS television program "Antiques Roadshow" attracts long lines of people clutching ancestral rifles and angel figurines. I doubt we really want to sell these precious things. Rather, we hope to validate publicly what we feel subjectively—that our family is unique, valuable, and deeply rooted. Once we find that, we don't want to leave.

Take, for instance, my new hometown of Hudson. Like any city in the throes of gentrification, it is a place of stark contrasts of condition and perception. Many of its residents are fighting addictions, subsisting at the poverty line, and worrying about rising rents. Others live in safe neighborhoods and enjoy property values bloated by emigrants from New York who have flocked to Hudson in recent years, hoping to grab a Victorian gem or Federal fixer-upper. The one thing that nearly everyone seemed to agree on this past year was their choice for President; but that guy lost badly. Is it any wonder that a recent survey named Hudson's residents the most "stressed out" in the entire state?

Given such psychic conditions, it's not surprising that Hudsonians should seek respite in the past. Warren Street, for instance, is a time capsule of 1880s commercial architecture. And on Warren between 3rd and 4th Streets stands the city's most magnificent civic building, the Hudson Opera House. It's like an island in a churning sea. With its massive stone foundation and vast walls of red brick that soar gracefully above the surrounding row houses, it seems permanent, timeless. Godzilla would have a tough time bringing it down.

That, I think, is the impression its designers intended. It was overbuilt by men and women with big ideas, boosters who wanted elbow-room for future growth. In May 1854 the Hudson Daily Star lauded the "tasty" appearance of the "Corinthian or Grecian" plans and approved of the "strength and permanency of the walls." Built in 1855 as Hudson's first City Hall, the building's extra space housed a library and a bank, and later, the post office and police station. Following convention in the 1880s, the building was re-dubbed an "opera house," its huge upstairs auditorium now doubling as a theater for lyceum lectures, traveling troupes, local musical performances, and even private affairs such as cotillions and poultry shows. It also operated as a common ground where white and black citizens could meet. A newspaper reporter in 1900 observed the building "filled with people" perusing items for sale at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church Fair.

That was the Opera House at its height. Later, the building's fortunes—following the city's—took a turn for the worse. In 1962, when City Hall moved up Warren Street, the building became a Moose Lodge, and then was sold to a developer. For the next 30 years, it was left to rot. In the late 1980s, a fire in the balcony almost spread to the entire building. A group of concerned citizens got together in 1992 and formed a non-profit organization called Hudson Opera House, Inc. Its purpose is to serve the community by "restoring the historic and architecturally significant Old City Hall... as a cultural and civic center for Hudson and the surrounding region" (www.hudsonoperahouse.org). The first floor is already home to an impressive array of multi-cultural programming, including opera, classical music, poetry readings, dance performances, and Kwanza celebrations. Work on restoring the auditorium should begin in the next two years.

The daunting task of coordinating all of this falls to its executive director Gary Schiro, who came to the Opera House seven years ago with a rich background in theatre work and arts funding. Unlike the officious woman who gave my mother a hard time, Schiro welcomes guests with warmth and a booming laugh. One of his favorite memories is a visit from an elderly Hudsonian named Benjamin Murrell. In the 1930s, "Benny the Bomber" was a champion boxer who knocked out many opponents in the upstairs auditorium. Murrell, who had since retired after many years as city official and benefactor, suggested that the Opera House resume staging fights. Schiro, no fan of violent sports, was impressed with Murrell's enthusiasm and encouraged him to look into it (alas, city codes got in the way). "Part of our success," says Schiro, "is tied to the fact that we provide a little something for everyone."

The Opera House is many things to many people. During its 150 years, it has been host to life in extremis for tens of thousands experiencing their most vulnerable moments: boxers landing left hooks, local girls taking dance lessons, drunks sleeping it off in a jail cell, backstage kisses between traveling performers, and anxious petitioners awaiting the Common Council's decision. One wonders how many people have been conceived there, how many have died. The building has served, in a sense, as a temporary home for souls in transition.

We rootless, restless Americans need such places. Hudson, like many towns in the valley, is a city in transition, suspended on the cusp of a post-industrial economy. The uncertainties of this transition, compounded as they are by the national and international traumas of our time, seem overwhelming, and it is not at all clear how things will turn out. One can only hope that our faith in democracy is as enduring as our civic buildings and stronger than our obsessions over property values. In this cynical age, the dreams we dream together about the Opera House call us to our better angels.