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Memories by Bev Jackson Cotter

Did you know that the Broadway Theater was built as an opera house in 1902?

Did you know that the developer was part owner of the four-story building on the next block that is now Brick Furniture?

Did you know that the original Broadway contained a large stage, an orchestra pit, dressing rooms, a green room and storage for stage settings?

Did you know that the grand opening included a road show extravaganza, the Blanche Walsh Company, with 60 performers?

Did you know that 10 years later the opera house transitioned to a movie theater and an organ was placed in the orchestra pit to provide music and sound effects for those first silent films?

Did you know that in later years the Broadway was home to spectacular movies like “Gone With the Wind,” “The Sound of Music,” “Oklahoma,” “An American in Paris” and “The Music Man?”

Did you know that in the 1950s high school kids, using their student passes, could see these incredible movies for 35 cents?

Where will our history, our memories go when another downtown building is destroyed?

When I was in Germany, I had an interesting conversation with an architect. I had been describing to him the copper sheeting on the red tiled roof of a newly constructed building. His response, “In Germany we build to last for five hundred years. In America you build to last for fifty.” And I thought, “No wonder so many tourists from around the world admire and compliment and absorb the history of the wonderful architecture here.”

When I was asked to serve on the Minnesota Review Board of the National Register of Historic Places, and I began to understand the process and the rigid requirements of the Register, I realized the incredible honor of that placement, an honor shown to Albert Lea’s downtown from Fountain Street to Pearl in addition to a small number of other local historic properties.

In order to remain on the Register, the original exterior of the buildings must be maintained and the interior updated as needed. I realize that maintaining and updating a historic building is expensive. Yet, I cannot help but agreed with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough when he asks, “How much of historic America, how much of our national heritage, will be left for future generations? And what does it say about us, of our values, of our regard for those who will follow, not to say those who went before us, if we as citizens stand by while others destroy historic America — knock it down, pave it over, blot it out — in the name of so-called progress and corporate profits?”

Bev Jackson Cotter is a lifelong Albert Lea resident.