{"nrhp_refnum":"74002184","name":"Woodstock Opera House","other_names":["Woodstock City Hall"],"category":"building","location":{"address":"119 Van Buren St.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Woodstock","county":"McHenry County","state":"IL","lat":42.33113118500006,"lon":-88.44787615299998,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1974-07-17","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Architecture"],"significance_levels":["national"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A municipal building at 119 Van Buren Street on the town square in Woodstock, McHenry County, Illinois, built 1889-90 to designs by architect Smith Hoag of Elgin. It combines a second-floor opera house with city offices, a library, a jail and fire department quarters.","why_significant":"The nomination calls it one of the very few nineteenth-century theaters surviving in a small-town setting in Illinois, with an exterior and auditorium that remain largely intact. Its design as a multipurpose civic building is distinctive, and it gives scale to Woodstock's town square. It is also tied to theatrical figures, notably Orson Welles, who staged a summer festival there in 1934.","narrative":"Woodstock Opera House occupies a corner of the town square at 119 Van Buren Street and was built in 1889-90 as the city's new City Hall. Architect Smith Hoag of Elgin designed it in white brick trimmed with red sandstone and terra cotta. The ground floor held a public library, municipal offices and fire department quarters, with a jail in the basement, while the second floor held an auditorium seating nearly 640. It opened on September 2, 1890. In the summer of 1934 Orson Welles, then a student at the nearby Todd School, produced a theater festival there. Winter stock seasons in 1948 featured performers such as Paul Newman and Geraldine Page. After decline by 1959, local students and townspeople cleaned and revived the theater. The building is valued as a rare surviving small-town nineteenth-century theater with an intact auditorium and as a multipurpose civic structure that anchors the square.","period_of_significance":"1889-90 (19th century)","architect_builder":"Smith Hoag, of Elgin, Illinois","architectural_style":null,"criteria":[],"status_note":"Listed in good condition and in use as city offices, a police station and a theater; the form notes the building is occupied.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:55:35.009365-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/34/8936/28893634/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_IL/74002184.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74002184/da5f396e85-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/74002184/da5f396e85-1600.webp","licence":"CC0","author":"HrAtsuo","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woodstock_Opera_House,_Woodstock,_IL.JPG\" rel=\"noopener\">HrAtsuo</a>, <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en\" rel=\"license noopener\">CC0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Woodstock_Opera_House,_Woodstock,_IL.JPG"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28893634","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_Opera_House","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8033446"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/illinois/mchenry-county/woodstock-opera-house-74002184/"}