The Hippodrome and the Town That Came Back Downtown
Near Gainesville, Florida
In nineteen eleven, the federal government completed a new building at the corner of Southeast Second Place in downtown Gainesville. It was designed in the Beaux-Arts style, with heavy stone cornices and tall arched windows that announced seriousness of purpose. The ground floor housed the United States Post Office. The second floor held a federal courthouse. The building was confident, permanent, built to last.
By the nineteen seventies, the federal government had moved on to newer facilities. Downtown Gainesville was struggling, its retail core gutted by suburban shopping centers, its streets half-empty in the evenings. In nineteen seventy-three, a group of young local theater artists decided to start a professional repertory theater. They needed a space. They found the old post office.
The Hippodrome State Theatre opened in the historic building. It became a performing arts anchor in a downtown that needed anchoring. Over more than fifty years of operation, the Hippodrome has been staging Broadway productions, regional premieres, and experimental work in a building that was designed for government, not performance.
The theater's founding in that building was also a kind of argument: that old things could be useful in new ways, that a dying downtown could be reinhabited rather than replaced. The Hippodrome was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine, just six years after it opened.
Gainesville's downtown today is livelier than it was when those young artists unlocked the old post office doors. The relationship between a repurposed federal building and a city's cultural center is still unfolding, still performing, still asking the same question the founders asked: what do you do with a beautiful old room when its original purpose has passed?
