Mechanics Hall: Workers Built This Stage

At three twenty-one Main Street stands a building that architectural historians have called the finest pre-Civil War concert hall in the United States. Mechanics Hall opened on March nineteenth, eighteen fifty-seven, and from the moment Worcester's tradesmen and artisans walked through its doors, they understood they had built something extraordinary.

The story starts a decade and a half earlier. In eighteen forty-two, Worcester's working mechanics, the machinists, foundry workers, and craftsmen who powered the city's industrial engine, formed the Worcester Mechanics Association. Their goal was to help members grow in knowledge and skill, to give working people access to the education that factory owners and lawyers took for granted. By the eighteen fifties, they had raised enough money to build a hall worthy of that mission.

They hired architect Elbridge Boyden, and he gave them a Renaissance Revival masterpiece. The Great Hall, which seats well over a thousand people, was designed with acoustics so precise that a speaker's voice carries to every seat without amplification of any kind. The building also contains the three-hundred-seat Washburn Hall and a library, making it the largest public venue in central Massachusetts when it opened.

The hall's history reads like a roster of American public life. Charles Dickens gave a reading here. President William Howard Taft spoke from its stage. Caruso sang. And in the years before the Civil War, Mechanics Hall became a platform for some of the most important reformers of the age. Abolitionists lectured here when other venues refused them. Women's rights advocates addressed the hall when society insisted women should be silent.

Mechanics Hall fell into decline in the mid-twentieth century, and by the nineteen seventies there were serious proposals to demolish it. A preservation campaign saved it, and a major restoration in nineteen seventy-seven returned it to its original condition. Today it is ranked among the top four concert halls in North America.

The mechanics of Worcester built this hall so that working people could claim their own culture. That claim still holds.