HISTORY
To pass the façade today, one might never guess the grandeur, though dusty and suspended in time, that lies inside on the second floor. In fact, it seems unfathomable that a small town in West Alabama would ever have been home to something so fancy. Yet the Greensboro Opera House was the cultural and social center of what was once a very prosperous town. Its wooden stage was lit by footlights at a time when many homes across the country still didn’t have electricity. It was a showcase for traveling minstrel shows, performers and dances. “They had them in every town this size, all these little towns across America. That’s what makes it so outstanding, really. It’s not that it’s that unique. It was such a part of American culture in all little towns across the country. But most of them disappeared. This is the only one dating from that period of this nature that is left in Alabama and probably, virtually, all over,” said Winifred Cobbs, president of the Greensboro Opera House board of directors. The advent of motion pictures led many opera houses to transition into movie theaters. Greensboro was among those converts. However, unlike some of the others, Greensboro retained its stage and, in addition to showing Rudolph Valentino films and the like, it continued to host vaudeville acts, bands, cultural performances and orations.
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CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: The chandelier that once hung in the center of the theater was removed when the opera house was converted to a movie house because it blocked the image being projected onto the screen. • The entrance into the theater on the second level includes the ticket booth. • Behind the balcony is the area used as projection space. The walls throughout the “hidden” areas of the opera house are filled with drawings and graffiti, left by actors, workers and patrons, and dating to its earliest years to the year when its doors were shuttered. • Fireplaces appear in almost every room of the opera house, built when there was no central heating.
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11/15/16 1:51 AM