The Opera House

In the center of Canonsburg, at its busiest intersection, stands the Morgan Building, a five-story structure that has two levels of street-level storefronts and three floors that contain fourteen apartments.  Built in 1891, it had been a commercial and social focal point for the town, every piece of mail passing through the post office in the arched entryway of the building's Central Avenue side, and the graduating students of Canonsburg High School commencing their adult lives in the graduation ceremonies held in the auditorium that was located in the upper floors.

The auditorium, originally accommodating 522 seats, was eventually expanded to include over 900.  All told, it served as a functioning theater for twenty years.   This month marks the 104th anniversary of its tragic final evening.

The event that closed the opera house, a panicked stampede that killed twenty-six people, is horrifying...even in the broad strokes, even after a century of existing mostly in faded ink.  Everything you might ever want to know about it can be found here.

I lived in this building for four years.  My wife and I had been married for less than two, our son was four months old.  He learned to walk there.  It's where he said his first words.  We conceived our daughter there.  We had cool neighbors.  When I think of this building, I have nothing but happy memories.

Late one night, my son and I carried a shoebox full of rubber balls to the top of the stairs where twenty-six people had died in screaming agony, and we let them go -- watched them swarm, violent and crazy, to the bottom to rattle against the glass doors.

In this moment and a hundred others, it never seemed possible that something like that could could be allowed to happen in a place that has held so much pain.  How dare a guy sit at the top of these stairs with his kid while they both laugh with the deep, audacious happiness of being alive and safe and awake waaaay past a three-year-old's regular bedtime.  The building became, for me, the embodiment of life's duality.

The luxury of living in Canonsburg and being curious about anything that has ever happened there, is the exhaustive work of the Jefferson College Historical Society.   Before we had lived there for a week, I walked to the library and photocopied an article from the Jefferson College Times, which held low-quality copies of these two images.  They gave me an enormous head rush.

For a twenty-five dollar reduction in our rent, my wife became a sort of on-site screener of rental applicants.  She'd show the empty apartments, collect information, walk people through the paperwork and hold a set of keys that allowed her creepy husband to wander around in maintenance and storage areas to see little glimpses of the building as it had been.  There were painted stencils around old ceiling fixtures, ladders to hatches that opened to the roof, the large structure at the top of the building that accommodated the stage backdrops.  These frustrating details only confused my understanding of the building's history.

So, how could I ever hope to understand what it would have been like to walk around in the Morgan Opera House given so little evidence?

I guess I could just rebuild it.

Opera House Month continues next week.