Tarrytown Music Hall: Older Than Carnegie Hall

When William Wallace built a theater in Tarrytown in eighteen eighty-five, Westchester County was in what boosters called its Millionaire's Colony era. The Hudson River villages south of the Tappan Zee had become the favored country retreat for New York's industrial wealthy, the same families whose names appear on the gates of Lyndhurst and the grounds of Philipsburg Manor. Wallace wanted his town to have a proper performance hall, and he hired the architect Philip Edmunds to design one, in the Queen Anne style.

What they built is the oldest operating theater in Westchester County, and one of the oldest in New York State, pre-dating Carnegie Hall, which opened in eighteen ninety-one, by six years. Only about six percent of American theaters built before nineteen hundred are still operating today. Tarrytown Music Hall is among them.

The building opened to live performance and quickly became the cultural center of the river towns. In nineteen oh one, just a few years after the Lumiere brothers had shown moving pictures in Paris, the Music Hall was already screening films, one of the first theaters in the country to do so. It has hosted vaudeville acts, lecture series, operas, and silent movies accompanied by piano.

The hall fell into decline through the mid-twentieth century, as television pulled audiences away from live venues and the surrounding towns lost population. By the nineteen seventies it faced demolition. A community campaign saved it, and in nineteen eighty it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today the Tarrytown Music Hall books national touring acts, independent films, and local productions with a capacity of around eight hundred. The building is undergoing ongoing restoration. The original pressed-tin ceilings and ornate proscenium survive, unchanged from the era when Gilded Age money built a village its own theater and expected it to last.