Loading...
260 Main Street (2) Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form. FORM B − BUILDING MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Photograph Topographic or Assessor's Map Recorded by: Bonnie Parsons Organization: Pioneer Valley Planning Commission Date (month / year): March, 2010 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 31D-166 Easthampton NTH.794 Town: Northampton Place: (neighborhood or village) Address: 260 Main Street Historic Name: Academy of Music Uses: Present: Theater Original: Theater Date of Construction: 1891 Source: Daily Hampshire Gazette Style/Form: Renaissance Revival Architect/Builder: William Brockelsby, architect, Hartford, Connecticut Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: brick, terra cotta, brownstone Roof: slate/tile Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Major Alterations (with dates): New marquee installed, 2010. Condition: good Moved: no | x | yes | | Date Acreage: 2 acres Setting: The Academy occupies a corner lot and is set back from the street, on the west side of a town park. The building faces north. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [260 MAIN STREET] MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 NTH.794 ___ Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form. Use as much space as necessary to complete the following entries, allowing text to flow onto additional continuation sheets. ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION: Describe architectural features. Evaluate the characteristics of this building in terms of other buildings within the community. The Academy of Music is a brick and brownstone building with terra cotta trim designed by architect William Brockelsby in the Renaissance Revival style. The building is in three sections. The northernmost section that is devoted to the lobbies, ticket offices and stairways, is a two-and-a-half story building under a flat, balustrade-lined roof. The first story is brownstone and the second and attic stories are a buff-colored brick against which a darker brick is contrasted for individual architectural elements. This section of the building is five bays wide and two bays deep and the center three bays make up a pedimented pavilion that projects slightly from the plane of the façade. On the first story paired pilasters divide the bays and in the pavilion are the three, double-leaf entrances to the theater, sheltered by a marquee suspended from the entablature above. The two outer bays have windows with Renaissance Revival eared architrave surrounds. The pilasters support a brownstone entablature that separates first and second stories. On the west elevation of this first section of the building is a front-gabled porte-cochere that rests on Doric columns. It attaches to a secondary entry to the lobby. In the second story of this lobby section darker brick pilasters frame the main block and the pavilion. They rest on a base set off by dark brick moldings and in the pavilion the base is filled with engaged balusters and terra cotta panels beneath the pilasters. The engaged balusters repeat the shape of those from the roof. Three windows punctuate the center pavilion on the second story. Beneath each is a terra cotta panel with ornament in relief. The outer two bays have two stories of windows with architrave surrounds. On the east and west elevations, the attic openings are blind. Above the second story entablature, a pediment with a terra cotta-ornamented tympanum is centered. The second section of the building consists of the auditorium. It is a red brick with yellow brick pilasters framing its four bays and two-and-a-half story height. This section of the building has a low-pitched roof whose cornice line is elaborately corbelled. The stories are divided by brownstone stringcourses and brownstone also forms the sills and lintels of the openings. On the west elevation of this section of the building and overlapping on to the third section is a two-story, hipped roof, brick wing. The third section of the Academy contains the stage and backstage of the theater. It is four stories in height, constructed of red brick and has a front-gable roof. Brownstone stringcourses separate the stories and brownstone forms continuous sills beneath the openings. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Discuss the history of the building. Explain its associations with local (or state) history. Include uses of the building, and the role(s) the owners/occupants played within the community. From Form B of 1975: “The Academy of Music was the first municipal theatre in the United States. The theatre was presented to the city by Edward H. R. Lyman in 1891. Outstanding lectures, concerts, operas, dramas, and even Christmas pageants were regularly presented. In 1912, a stock company began the presentation of a different play each week. This first municipal theatre company in the United States achieved national fame. William Powell and James Rennie were among the well-known members. The Academy of Music was designed in 1891 by architect William Brockelsby.” SUMMARY OF SIGNIFICANCE The Northampton Academy of Music is significant as the first municipally owned theater in the United States and for its history as venue for many of the area’s successive forms of entertainment. Built in 1891, the Academy of Music began its long history with vaudeville companies that were just forming a national network at the turn-of-the-century. Beginning in 1904 the Academy began integrating motion pictures with vaudeville in its entertainment schedule, and in 1912 a repertory theater company provided the third major form of entertainment. Taken together these three forms of entertainment characterized the region and Northampton’s theater offerings from the end of the 19th through the first third of the 20th centuries. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [260 MAIN STREET] MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 NTH.794 The Academy of Music offered performances of most of the nation’s finest actors, and of vaudeville acts that influenced American theater and film for generations. It was the site of legitimate theater’s introduction of works by playwrights George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen. Strindberg’s Easter, for example, got its first American stage production here in 1918. The Academy of Music has taken part in 107 years of movie history: 1904-2011, and still going. Between 1891 and 1950 actors who performed at the Academy included Maude Adams, Richard Mansfield, Ellen Terry, Eddy Foy, Harry Leighton and Forbes-Roberston Farwell. Olga Petrova, Douglas Fairbanks, Dorothy Gish, James Rennie, Lionel and Ethyl Barrymore all appeared on its stage. In the 1940s Eva Le Gallienne, Victor Jory, Ruth Gordon and John Carradine appeared, among others. Famous acts such as Houdini, Mack Sennett and the Katzenjammer Kids played to Northampton audiences as part of touring vaudeville companies. While these are the names familiar today, it was the host of performers in musicals, lyric operas, and melodramas weekly filling the playbills that place the Academy of Music in the nation’s broad entertainment history. HISTORY OF THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC The Academy of Music was built by Edward H. R. Lyman a Northampton native who kept a summer house off South Street in Northampton, but lived in Brooklyn, New York where he was a member of the tea importing company, Low and Sons. Lyman was a member of a family that was prominent in Northampton; his father was Judge Joseph Lyman born in the city in 1767. In New York Edward Lyman was on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a cultural institution that had been established in 1861. At the turn of the century when the City Beautiful Movement was bringing fine architecture and public amenities to cities throughout the country, patrons of the arts were establishing cultural institutions further to improve the lives of residents. Edward Lyman expressed a similar sense of “noblesse oblige” towards his hometown, saying he wished to give back to it, as his family had done for several generations. In 1889 Lyman began to discuss the possibility of creating a cultural institution for Northampton modeled, perhaps, on his New York experience, and in 1890 he bought the Kingsley property on Main Street as a site for an Academy of Music. He hired Hartford, Connecticut architect William C. Brockelsby to design the building, and it was opened in 1891, having cost $125,000, as the first municipally owned theater in the country. Lyman deeded the Academy to a board of trustees for the benefit of the city. The trustees were the mayor of Northampton, the president of Smith College, an appointee or heir of Lyman – initially his son Frank – and two other citizens. Profits from the performances were to go to Northampton, but deficits were also to be covered by the city. Maintenance was to be supported by the theater’s earnings and administered by the trustees. In the deed Lyman stated that he wanted to contribute to the happiness of the city’s residents, and he saw the Academy as a place for wholesome, cultural entertainments. He specifically wanted lectures, concerts, operas and drama “of the better sort” to take place in the 1,040 seat Academy, and nothing political. Lyman financially guaranteed the Academy for its first three years. From newspaper accounts it can be seen that Smith College put on many performances, opening the theater in 1891 with Spanish Gypsy and classical theater such as Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1895. There were also community events held in the Academy such as a Civil War soldiers’s reunion. The Academy’s manager brought in plays from outside the community as well. Presumably these were road shows, vaudeville presentations that were just coming into vogue across the country and were available through several management companies: United Booking Artists, Vaudeville Managers’ Association, and the Schubert Brothers. A 1916 account by Professor Alfred Pearce Dennis of Smith College indicates that vaudeville was popular in town with the “mill operatives” who needed entertainment at low prices such as that provided by the Corse Peyton Repertoire Company, but that college students preferred drama by playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw. The two strains of theater - plays and acts - persisted side-by-side in vaudeville. Despite the tone of condescension by Professor Dennis, the quality of vaudeville that came to Northampton was the finest in the country and a history of the vaudeville acts that performed on the Academy Stage mirror the evolution of the theater form in the United States. Nationally famous actors were bracketed by acts that were much less serious. Touring vaudeville acts had all the variety that vaudeville was known for with opening and closing acts by The Great Brindamour magician; The Katzenjammer Kids, the 1903 musical Girls will be Girls with a closing act that included game cocks. Musicals were touted for the size of their casts: The Mocking Bird a lyric play boasted a cast of 60; others advertised how many in the large casts were girls. Between 1905 and 1910 the playbills became increasingly devoted to acts and light musical theater until jugglers, “70 Jolly Minstrel Men” and moving picture segments were outweighing drama by a large measure. A few lectures show up in the publicity for the Academy. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [260 MAIN STREET] MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 NTH.794 In 1911, for instance, Edward S. Curtis lectured on North American Indians. There were entertainments striving to be lectures such as when Mrs. Emily Montague Bishop gave dramatic scenes from the U.S. Senate. Classical theater made a few appearances so that Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin made an appearance in 1911. Gradually, movies began to show up more often as their popularity grew. The first moving image on a screen had appeared in 1895 and in Northampton new movies were being shown every night at the Academy by 1904. By 1912 advocates for serious, consistent drama to be presented at the Academy had organized to form the first of a series of repertory companies centered at the Academy. The first was the Northampton Players who between 1912 and 1919 put on plays by August Strindberg, Hendrick Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, among others. Their performances were integrated with those of the vaudeville troops that continued booking on a weekly basis. World War I cut down attendance at the theater and the influenza pandemic of 1918 closed it entirely. In 1919 the Northampton Players folded and the Academy went back to filling its schedule of performances with movies and vaudeville. During the 1920s vaudeville died out, however, and movies took over the Academy as they did theaters throughout the country. Support for live theater, however, didn’t stop, and in 1925 a new theatrical company was formed at the Academy, the Northampton Repertory Company. This company performed until 1936. Following the Northampton Repertory Company, the Academy Players had a single season in 1936-1937. By the 1940s touring plays and musicians came to the Academy to supplement the movies. Ethyl Barrymore in 1943; Eva Le Gallienne, Victor Jory, and Ruth Gordon appeared in 1945 and John Carradine in 1945. Musicians Jose Greco and Carlos Montoya performed with Pilar Lopez and Manolo Vargas in 1944. The mix of community events, movies, film festivals, and live performances has continued to the present, fulfilling the initial objectives of Edward Lyman to provide a cultural resource for the City of Northampton There was little competition from other theaters in Northampton. Cook’s Vaudeville House was the sole competition until the early 1900s when the Holyoke Opera House and the Mountain Park Casino appeared to present plays and vaudeville acts. In 1924 Samuel and Nathan Goldstein built the Calvin Theater in Northampton for movies and vaudeville. By the 1920s vaudeville was finally replaced by the movies which shared billing with the Northampton Players at the Academy. Movies by Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd appeared, followed by Eddie Cantor in the 1930s. The architect of the Academy of Music was William C. Brockelsby of Hartford, Connecticut. Brockelsby was born in Hartford in 1848, son of Professor John Brockelsby of Trinity College. He graduated from Trinity in 1869 then studied with Richard Upjohn in New York where he was exposed to the Late Victorian stylistic idioms of architecture. In Hartford his major works were the Brown and Noah Webster Schools, the National Fire Insurance Building and the Church of the Redeemer. Brockelsby began working in Northampton before the Academy of Music commission building for Smith College in 1886 the High Victorian Gothic Lilly Hall on Elm Street followed in 1890 by the High Victorian Gothic Alumnae Gym at 83 Green Street, now the Archives building. Brockelsby’s eclectic approach to style, a late 19th century use of revivals was demonstrated in his work in Northampton. With the two highly visible Smith College projects, he came to the attention of Edward Lyman who hired him to design the Academy of Music. At the same time he was working on the Renaissance Revival style Academy, Brockelsby was building a third Smith College facility, Lawrence House, a Colonial Revival style dormitory at 99-101 Green Street. Soon after, the City of Northampton hired Brockelsby to design and construct the Romanesque Revival Forbes Library, 20 West Street, 1894. In 1897 he constructed Tyler House in English Revival style, 123 Green Street, for Smith College and in 1899 he completed Albright House, an English Revival style building at 7 Bedford Terrace for the college. He was 62 when he died at his home in Hartford in 1910, an Associate of the American Institute of Architects. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES Beers, F. W. County Atlas of Hampshire Massachusetts, New York, 1873. Hales, John G. Plan of the Town or Northampton in the County of Hampshire, 1831. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET [NORTHAMPTON ] [260 MAIN STREET] MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 NTH.794 Miller, D. L. Atlas of the City of Northampton and Town of Easthampton, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, 1895. Walker, George H. and Company. Atlas of Northampton City, Massachusetts, Boston, 1884. Walling, Henry F. Map of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, New York, 1860.