The Palace: Vaudeville, Harry Houdini, and a Century on Hanover Street

Victor Charas was a Greek immigrant who believed Manchester needed a first-class theater. In nineteen fourteen, he hired architect Leon Lempert and Son and broke ground on a building at eighty Hanover Street that was modeled directly on the Palace Theatre in New York City. The building opened on April ninth, nineteen fifteen, and was immediately recognized as something unusual for a New England mill city: it was fireproof, fully air-conditioned by fans blowing air over large blocks of ice beneath the stage, and it seated audiences in a hall ornamented with plasterwork and gilded boxes.

For fifteen years, Hanover Street was the center of Manchester's entertainment world. Vaudeville companies cycled through on national touring circuits. Jimmy Durante appeared on that stage.

Bob Hope appeared there. Harry Houdini performed his escapes before an audience that had paid specifically to watch a man free himself from things designed to prevent it. The downtown cluster of theaters and restaurants was collectively referred to, with characteristic civic ambition, as the Great White Way.

Vaudeville fell to the talkies in the late nineteen twenties, and the Palace adapted, becoming a movie house through the nineteen thirties and forties. By the late sixties it had been converted to classroom space for New Hampshire College. It was closed, and it sat.

On November second, nineteen seventy-four, the Palace reopened after a renovation as a performing arts center. It is still operating today. The gilded boxes are still there.

A century of audiences has climbed the same stairs, settled into the dark, and waited for something to happen.