Lakeport Opera House is back for an encore

LACONIA — There was a time that the old Lakeport Opera House looked like a lost cause.

The storefronts were empty and the large windows on the second and third floors were boarded up with plywood.

“Many of us were thinking, if nothing was done it should be taken down,” said Pat Tierney of Laconia, who grew up just a few blocks from the building that, for 138 years, has dominated Lakeport Square and in its heyday bustled with activity.

A focal point

Tierney said for decades the building was where Lakeport residents would go regularly as they went about their daily errands.

There were plenty of reasons to go to what was initially called Moore’s Opera House, but later simply the Opera House.

The first floor housed the Lakeport Branch of the Laconia Post Office, a drug store, and a grocery store. On the front of the second floor was a barbershop, but most of the second floor housed a theater. On the top floor were the meeting rooms used by the Odd Fellows Chocorua Lodge and a local post of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Ginger Ryan, who today lives around the corner from the Opera House, remembers going to the theater to see movies or touring or locally-produced stage shows. Once, in the 1940s, Ryan was on the stage instead of in the audience when she had a role in a minstrel show. Ties to the theater run deep in Ryan’s family. Before Ryan was born, her grandmother, Lydia Tefft, played the piano for silent movies, she said.

Ryan grew up on the other side of the Elm Street Bridge — or “on the other side of the tracks” as she put it — from the Opera House, along with Dorothy Duffy and Mary Walker.

Duffy remembers cashing in soda bottles and using that money to pay for her theater ticket which cost 10 cents, plus 2 cents tax.

They were mostly B movies, Duffy recalled. But major motion pictures, like “Gone With the Wind,” were also screened there, according to Tierney.

Duffy and Walker on Thursday had a chance to walk through the theater. The seats are gone but the decoration along the front of the balcony, the embossed tin ceiling, and the suspended glass globe light fixtures remain. Duffy pointed to where the theater’s concession stand used to be.

The Odd Fellows regularly offered their lodge rooms for school events and civic groups. So even local people who did not belong to the fraternal organization often got to see the ornate meeting rooms.

“The Odd Fellows were very good about sharing their space,” said Tierney who today serves as noble grand (president) of the Chocorua Lodge.

By 1960 the Opera House theater was no longer in regular use and the building was showing its age. In 1969 the Odd Fellows left the building, which by then was owned by Jerry Horn, a pharmacist who had been operating the drug store in the building since 1964.

Horn covered the building in vinyl siding and rented out a small space on the Clinton Street side of the building to a barber. In 1977, Horn sold the drug store but continued to own the building until he sold it in 2015. By then the long-term tenants were gone and the storefronts had been rented out to a succession of second-hand shops and consignment stores.

Enter Scott Everett, who owns a mortgage bank, bought the three-story building – with its 13,800 square feet of space – 14 months ago and quickly set about transforming it with a new exterior, new windows and new infrastructure. All the work is estimated to cost about $450,000, according to city records.

In an interview with The Daily Sun in July 2019, Everett said he considered the Opera House and other revitalization projects he is planning for Lakeport as a way of giving back to the area near where he grew up in Gilford.

“I’ve just been blessed,” said Everett, who owns a home locally. "If I didn’t give back to some degree, then I would be remiss the rest of my life for it,” he said at the time. “... I’m fortunate that I can help people now.”

For Tierney, the restored Opera House is a sign that the building can once again be Lakeport’s centerpiece.

“It certainly had a heyday,” he said referring to its vibrant past. “It was the only place to go if you didn’t have a car.”

Now thousands of cars pass the building every day. Times have changed, but the restored Opera House with the cursive lettering that adorns the front of the building reading “Opera house, Est. 1882” is once again turning heads.

“It’s such an upgrade from what it was,” Tierney observed. “It’s fabulous.”

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Today, from 4 to 6 p.m., the public will get a chance to see the results of building owner Scott Everett’s effort to restore the building to its former glory, making it a focal point of one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

People will have a chance to tour the theater on the second floor, as well as view the new offices of The Laconia Daily Sun, and visit the Wayfarer Coffee Roasters cafe next door. Everett will also answer questions about the project and his other plans for Lakeport.