SCHS: Photo of the Week -- Opera House & Post Office, Main St., Greenport, c. 1905 / Archival Postcard

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Photo of the Week

FROM THE SCHS LIBRARY & ARCHIVE

“How shall we know it is us without our past?”
– John Steinbeck

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View of Opera House and Post Office, Main Street, Greenport, c. 1905. (From the Postcard Collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society Library & Archive. Image copyright (c) Suffolk County Historical Society. All rights reserved.)

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Built in 1899, the elegant Greenport Opera House was located on Main Street and Bay Avenue until the mid-1950s, when it was demolished. A bank parking lot currently occupies the same space today.

The large structure with an ornate cupola was the site of many different types of goings-on in the village — civic meetings, fairs and festivals, entertainments, and commercial activities. Given the massive size and impressive architecture of the Opera House, I was surprised to find so little information about the venue in our published works and archival collections, so reached out for assistance to Southold Town Historian, Amy Folk.

Antonia Booth, former Southold Town Historian, in her 2003 book Greenport, notes the Opera House sat on the former site of Stirling Hall, where the first performance of Edison’s phonograph or “human talking machine” took place in 1893. When that building burned on New Year’s Day 1899, it was replaced by the ornate Opera House. The Stirling Athletic Club occupied the second floor of the Opera House, and Tom and Edith Moore once operated an ice cream shop in the building. The Greenport Post Office (bottom-center of postcard) had earlier moved to Stirling Hall from the Clark House, and then remained in the Opera House until a fire in the building, at which point the post office moved to its Front Street location.

Booth also notes that Frank Harley showed files at the Opera House, until one night in 1911 the projector caught fire. The flames spread and burned most of the front of the building. While the bulk of the Opera House was saved, its façade was greatly changed. The building was torn down in the mid-twentieth century.

by Wendy Polhemus-Annibell, Head Librarian, with thanks to Amy Folk, Southold Town Historian

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