City Theater, Biddeford

Biddeford's City Theater reopened in eighteen ninety-six after a fire, in the heart of a Franco-American mill city, and it was built to serve an audience that was as likely to speak French as English. The building on Main Street was designed by architect John Calvin Stevens and seated close to five hundred people. For decades it hosted vaudeville, traveling theater companies, and eventually films.

The theater went dark in nineteen sixty-five as television and drive-ins hurt movie houses, but a volunteer restoration effort brought it back to life in nineteen seventy-eight. Today it operates again as a performing arts venue, one of the few surviving Victorian-era theaters in Maine still doing what it was built to do: give a working-class city somewhere beautiful to spend an evening.