Community Projects: Lisbon
In 1889, Lisbon was a booming railroad town. In an effort to bring some culture to the community, two sisters commissioned the building of a three–story brick Opera House at a cost of about 20–thousand dollars.
In the early to mid 1900s, the building has housed local businesses on the ground level. Music, theatre and graduation events occurred on the second floor. But by the late 1980s the building sat vacant and boarded up along the city’s main street.
“It was pretty shabby,” according to Dick Larson of the Lisbon Opera House Foundation. Attempts had been made to find a new use for the building when JC Penny’s vacated the building but the owner had been unsuccessful finding a new tenant. In the end, the owner donated the historic building to a non–profit group of local volunteers who are working to bring back the Opera House’s grandeur –and its role in the community as a civic and cultural center.
But the group found it is not an easy task to restore an historic building. The Secretary of Interior has established rigorous guidelines for preserving historical properties and it was just not feasible or practical to “restore” the building to its original condition according to those guidelines.
“We want this building to be self supporting,” Larson explained. “It needs to be a functional building. It’s not going to be a museum.” Therefore the group is undertaking a “rehabilitation” – returning the property to a state of utility while also preserving features of the property that are significant to its historic, architectural, and cultural values.
Currently, although there is still much work to do repairing and rehabilitating the building, a local theater group called The No Name Players holds performances and fundraisers for the Lisbon Opera House Foundation.
Although the Lisbon Opera House’s exterior has been refurbished, the interiors still require much renovation.