Art of Business: Show Business

Art of Business: The Bardavon 1869 Opera House

by Ann Braybrooks and photographs by Jennifer May, April 28, 2007

In 1869, in downtown Poughkeepsie, during the Collingwood Opera House’s inaugural season, Mark Twain delivered a lecture titled “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.”

In March 2006, almost 140 years later, Bob Dylan—a songwriter also known for his social commentary and linguistic shenanigans—stepped into the same theater (renamed the Bardavon 1869 Opera House), not to perform, but to work on material for the recording which became the Grammy-winning Modern Times. The same artist returned in March of this year to rehearse behind closed doors for a European tour.

“Mark Twain, Bob Dylan—there’s a relationship there,” says Chris Silva, executive director of the Bardavon, a nonprofit entity that brings performing arts (primarily theater, music, and dance) to residents of the Hudson Valley. Bardavon venues include the historic theater on Poughkeepsie’s Market Street, the restored Broadway Theater of the Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, and parks, schools, and community spaces throughout the Mid-Hudson area.
Besides Twain and Dylan, whom Silva calls “two of the great poets of America,” artists who have performed on the original Bardavon stage include Will Rogers, Sarah Bernhardt, Al Pacino, John Philip Sousa, Patti Smith, Isadora Duncan, and Martha Graham. During the theater’s history, other individuals have used the venue to address, enlighten, and influence audiences, among them, Julia Ward Howe, William Jennings Bryan, William McKinley, Jr., William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the late 1860s, coal and lumber magnate James Collingwood built the theater as a “palace of amusement” for the citizens of Poughkeepsie, on the former site of a coal yard he owned. When the facility opened in 1869, it seated 2,000 people, a quarter of them on benches on the third level, the “peanut gallery,” where peanuts were the snack of choice. In its current configuration, the Bardavon seats 944.

In 1923, the theater was transformed into a combination performance and movie house (reflecting the popularity of talking pictures); and in 1975, the building was rescued from demolition by a committee of local citizens. The group bought the building, and, due to its efforts, in 1978 the theater was added to the National Register of Historic Places.