Temple Theater Meridian: A Shrine to Spectacle

The Hamasa Shriners needed a new temple by the early nineteen twenties, and they hired the right architect. Emile Weil of New Orleans was already the go-to designer for Saenger Amusements theaters across the South when the Meridian Shriners brought him in. What he produced between nineteen twenty-three and nineteen twenty-seven was something beyond a meeting hall. The Temple Theater opened on May twenty-second, nineteen twenty-eight, and it immediately claimed a distinction that would follow it for decades: at the time of its construction, it contained one of the largest stages in the United States, second only to the Roxy Theater in New York City.

Weil designed the building in the Moorish Revival style, a choice that gave the interior a quality closer to a dream than a civic hall. Marble fountains flank the lobby. Large bronze chandeliers hang overhead. The auditorium carries a Byzantine motif with intricate tile and plasterwork. Deeper inside, the original three-manual, eight-rank Robert Morton pipe organ still sits in place, installed when the theater opened and never removed.

The building also contains a ballroom on its upper floors, a reminder that the Shriners built it first for themselves and secondarily for the public.

The Temple Theater screened silent films from its opening in nineteen twenty-eight, then transitioned to sound pictures as the technology arrived. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December eighteenth, nineteen seventy-nine, part of the wave of preservation designations that recognized Meridian's downtown as an unusually intact ensemble of late nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial architecture.

Today the theater operates as a performing arts venue, still hosting live performances in a room whose scale and ornament remind audiences that Meridian, at the height of its rail-era prosperity, built things meant to last.