Boston Music Hall

The Boston Music Hall was a concert hall located on Winter Street in Boston, Massachusetts, with an additional entrance on Hamilton Place.

One of the oldest continuously operating theaters in the United States, it was built in 1852 and was the original home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The hall closed in 1900 and was converted into a vaudeville theater named the Orpheum Theatre. The Orpheum, which still stands today, was substantially rebuilt in 1915 by architect Thomas W. Lamb as a movie theater.

The hall has no connection with Boston's "Music Hall", a theater which is now known as the Wang Theatre.

The Boston Music Hall was built in 1852, thanks to a donation of $100,000, made by the Harvard Musical Association, for its construction. The Handel and Haydn Society performed at the hall's inaugural concert. The hall was the first home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881 and was also the birthplace of the New England Conservatory of Music. The BSO performed the American premiere of the Piano Concerto No. 1, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky here. After being threatened by road building and subway construction, the Music Hall was replaced as the home of the Boston Symphony in 1900, by Symphony Hall.

In addition to concerts, the hall presented important speakers of the time. Methodist minister Henry Morgan lectured in the hall ca.1859. On December 31, 1862, the eve of the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Northern abolitionists gathered at the Music Hall to celebrate as the clock struck midnight. Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Tubman attended. Oscar Wilde lectured here in 1882.

...
Wikipedia