Central Hall

Contributed by John Duda

 Here, you are sitting on the porch of the Maplewood Inn, which was located where the village park is located nowadays. Across the street you can see the building known as Central Hall, which was located on the corner of Main and Richmond, where the parking lot for the grocery store and the ice cream stand are now located.

For many years, the second floor of that building across the street was an important center of social activity. That was were they voted to incorporate and become a village in 1880. That is where the village mourned the death of President James A. Garfield in 1881, a very solemn and moving memorial. That is where the Presbyterian church met for several years while they were building the brick edifice that still stands on Richmond Avenue. That is were High School met for many years until they finally got their own building between Lake street and Cayuga street.

Central hall hosted masquerade balls, dances, vaudeville shows, Valentine parties, all night Christmas dances, Halloween parties, school performances, ice cream and strawberry festivals, magic shows, theater, including such favorites as “The Deacon”, “Moll Pitcher”, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Regents’ examinations, Republican and Democratic rallies, oyster suppers, G.A.R “campfires”, moving pictures with programs “of the very best reels of the latest output, and of the highest class character—clean, interesting and unquestionably moral”, art exhibitions, medal contests, farmers’ institutes, teacher examinations, blind musicians, Indian concerts, banjoists, comic actors, celebrated singers and elocutionists, minstrels, rhetoricals, historical exhibits, concerts, humorists and impersonators, recitations, church Christmas sales, lectures, for example, “Upon the Tariff Question from the reform standpoint”, patriotic tableaux, Old Folks’ concerts, board of education meetings (often quite heated), and fundraisers for local churches, the Sidewalk Association, the school library, the public library, the Village Improvement Society, the Garfield and Arthur club, the G.A.R., the Rebekahs, and similar organizations.

Often local talent performed there, but often it was out of town acts with names like “The Six Nation Indian Medicine Company”, “Starr Comedy Company”, and “The Moran Sisters of Syracuse”. Arthur C. Sidman, whose life you can read about on wikipedia, performed at Central Hall at the time the Fair Haven band was organized and produced a play for the band’s benefit, playing “two nights to the largest houses ever given a repeated performance.”

Another famous speaker at Central Hall was Miss Elizabeth Freeman of New York City, a Negro suffragist whose life you can also read about on wikipedia, who spoke at a suffrage meeting on the question, “Votes for Women.”

Central Hall also witnessed the advance of technology.

• In 1878, they held a “telephone concert”, in which they connected 23 telephone circuits from the train station at North Fair Haven to Central Hall and 250 people enjoyed the music of an orchestra playing in Auburn.
• In 1894, the World’s Fair was shown through a “magic lantern”, something like an early slide projector.
• In 1899, the Great Dewey Parade was “faithfully reproduced in living photographs by the Bioscope”, an early name for a movie camera, also short for a “bioscope show”, a traveling movie theater.
• In 1907, there were moving pictures on exhibition that turned out to be “the biggest fake that was ever pulled off in this town.”
• In 1910, the State Department of Health gave a tuberculosis exhibit using “stereopticon slides” to enlighten the people on the dangers of the tuberculosis germs.
• In 1915, a “cameragraph picture plant” was installed and regularly scheduled moving pictures were shown.

It was heavily damaged by a fire in October of 1959 and then finished off in a controlled burn by the firemen on Sunday, October 9th, 1960.

The owner removed much of the lumber before the burn. As the inside frame burned, the brick walls caved in on themselves. The fire department didn’t advertise that before hand because they didn’t want a big crowd standing around in case the walls caved outward instead of inward.