Smith Opera House

On Seneca Street in downtown Geneva stands a building that has served the city as a cultural anchor for more than a hundred and thirty years. The Smith Opera House opened on October twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-four with a production of the Count of Monte Cristo starring James O'Neill, the father of playwright Eugene O'Neill. It was built by a local philanthropist and businessman named William Smith, who commissioned the architectural firm of Pierce and Bickford to design a theater in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with a broad brick and stone facade and arched openings of the style's signature weight.

The theater was conceived as a gift to the community, built with the goal of bringing serious touring productions to a city that was large enough to want them and small enough that few companies paused there on their own initiative. For its first decades the Smith hosted traveling theater companies, lecturers, and variety performers on the circuits that connected small American cities before motion pictures changed the economics of live performance.

In nineteen thirty-one, the building was renovated as a movie theater, its interior transformed by architect Victor Rigaumont into an eclectic combination of Art Deco and Baroque motifs. That renovated interior, restored in a major campaign beginning in nineteen ninety-four, is what visitors see today: the ornate balcony, the proscenium, the plasterwork, and the character of a performance hall that survived the wrecking ball at least twice and has never been quite replaced by anything else in the region. The Smith is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.