The Grand Opera House: Wilmington's Restored Jewel
A nineteenth-century theater saved from the wrecking ball has become the anchor of the city's performing-arts life.
On Wilmington's Market Street stands a building that nearly did not survive the twentieth century. The Grand Opera House, a jewel of nineteenth-century theater architecture, fell on hard times as tastes changed and downtowns emptied, and for a stretch its future looked grim.
Its rescue was a civic project. A coalition of preservationists and arts advocates fought to save the ornate cast-iron facade and the intimate auditorium behind it, and a painstaking restoration brought the theater back from the brink.
Today it anchors the city's performing-arts life. Concerts, touring productions, and a full calendar of performances fill the historic hall, and the restored interior gives audiences a sense of occasion that a modern venue struggles to match.
The theater's survival is a lesson in what a determined community can preserve. Countless grand old theaters across the country were lost to demolition; Wilmington's was saved, and it now does exactly what it was built to do — fill a beautiful room with an audience, night after night.
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