The Grand Opera House: From Vaudeville to Riley Center
Mississippi
In eighteen eighty-nine, Israel Marks and his half-brothers Levi, Sam, and Marx Rothenberg commissioned a building on Fifth Street in downtown Meridian. They were German-Jewish immigrants who had prospered in Mississippi's rail-era economy, and they wanted something that matched the ambition of the moment. Swedish architect Gustave M. Torgerson designed it. Local contractor Charles Rubush built it. The Grand Opera House of Mississippi opened in December of eighteen ninety.
For about the next thirty years, this stage was the premier entertainment venue between Atlanta and New Orleans. Meridian sat on the main theatrical circuit, which meant the Grand Opera House received legitimate opera sung in multiple languages, vaudeville touring companies, minstrel shows, and dramatic theater in the full range available to Southern audiences of the era. It was, by contemporary accounts, one of the finest facilities of its type in the South.
The building converted to a movie theater around nineteen twenty and closed before the decade ended. For the better part of eighty years it sat empty, used at various times as warehouse space, its ornamental ironwork rusting, its interior darkening.
The rescue came slowly. In nineteen ninety-nine, Mississippi State University president Malcolm Portera helped coordinate a preservation effort. The Riley Foundation, a Meridian-based philanthropy, committed ten million dollars in two thousand. City, county, and federal partners joined to complete a twenty-five-million-dollar restoration. The MSU Riley Center for Education and Performing Arts opened on September eighth, two thousand six.
Today the Riley Center presents touring Broadway productions, concerts, and community performances in the same hall where audiences once sat for turn-of-the-century opera and vaudeville. The adjacent Marks-Rothenberg department store building has also been restored as part of the complex, reuniting the two structures the immigrant merchants built together more than a century before.
