Before the picture houses: the halls, and the opera-house test

THE TOURING ERA BEFORE A PURPOSE-BUILT HOUSE · TO 1909

The test, run first: a city of Mishawaka's size and date ordinarily kept an opera house — a purpose-built hall of the 1880s or 1890s in which road companies, opera troupes, lecturers and minstrel shows played on a raised stage before a seated town. South Bend built exactly that in 1885, and its course is that city's record. For Mishawaka, no purpose-built opera house is established in the record reached: no nomination, no city-history account and no theatre inventory names one, and the documented rooms in which Mishawaka took its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century performances are halls — church halls, society halls, the public halls of the hotels and the school — whose entertainment course is carried in the culture and religion records at the size those records give it. The negative is printed as what it is, an absence in the record reached, and the settling sources are named: the city directories and the Mishawaka Enterprise's amusement columns across the 1880s and 1890s, and the county histories' own building inventories, read at that depth.

What the record does carry at full strength is the scale of the appetite those halls fed. The documented summit of the hall era is the evening of 28 October 1908, printed whole in the culture record: Vice President Charles Fairbanks, a week from the general election, was escorted into Mishawaka, supped at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, addressed more than a thousand people outside Mayor Charles Frank's residence, spoke to five thousand in the street, and then went indoors and addressed a Republican convocation for over an hour — in the Century Theater, in the commissioned history's account. Five thousand people in a street, in a city of some twelve thousand, is the measure of what a visiting name could draw before the city had a room built to hold one. The Century's own entry follows, and with it a conflict the record does not resolve: the history places a working Century Theater in Mishawaka in October 1908, and the Tivoli's National Register nomination dates the Century to 1909. Both statements stand in this section, printed in their places, and neither is averaged away.

The second bound of the hall era is an absence of a different kind. In the fall of 1918 the Spanish influenza closed the culture entire, as the culture record documents: from mid-October to 15 November 1918 public gatherings were prohibited and churches and schools shut, in a city counting more than three hundred cases and some twenty-five dead. Whatever rooms Mishawaka then kept — halls, the Century, the Temple — stood dark by epidemic order for a season. It is the first documented occasion on which every stage in the city went silent at once, and it belongs to this section because the silence was total: the halls, the churches and the picture rooms were closed by the same order, as one apparatus of assembly.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History (city-commissioned history), as carried in Culture — the Fairbanks evening of 28 October 1908, the five-thousand street crowd, and the convocation inside the Century Theater; the influenza closure of gatherings, churches and schools, mid-October to 15 November 1918.
2. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Tivoli Theater (prepared September 1997; listed 1 April 1998) — the Century dated 1909 in the nomination's survey of the city's earlier houses.
3. The South Bend theaters record of this history — the Oliver Opera House of 1885 as the neighboring city's opera-house form, boundary-printed for the comparison only.