Fire took Portsmouth's only entertainment venue on Christmas Eve of 1876, and by 1878 The Music Hall rose in its place, the oldest operating theater in New Hampshire. This independent venue brings 130,000 visitors a year and presents music, readings, comedy, and cinema — it has welcomed musicians such as Tony Bennett and authors such as Dan Brown. The story you’re facing began after a fire on Christmas Eve of 1876, when Portsmouth’s only venue for entertainment burned to the ground.
In 1878 a group of Seacoast residents — a banker, a railroad executive, a lawyer, a housewife, and a clergyman, all members of the prominent Peirce family — joined to rebuild what they called "The Temple. That lot had even older layers: the site was once a Baptist meetinghouse and, before that, the country’s first almshouse and a prison. When it opened, speakers quoted the idea that "a community is known to some extent by the character and place of its amusements," and you can still feel that civic pride here.
Notice the theater's façade and picture the crowds still filling Chestnut Street tonight.