Methuen Memorial Music Hall

About this property

Methuen Memorial Music Hall, initially named Serlo Organ Hall, is a music hall built by Edward Francis Searles to house "The Great Organ", a very large pipe organ originally built for the Boston Music Hall. The hall was completed in 1909, and stands at 192 Broadway in Methuen, Massachusetts. "The Great Organ" was built by the E. F. Walcker Company of Ludwigsburg, Germany. It arrived in the US from Europe in March 1863, with installation completed in November 1863. It was at the time believed to be the largest pipe organ in the United States. Since then the count has gone up to its present 6,088 pipes and 84 registers. It was the first concert organ in the United States and was installed at the Boston Music Hall. The organ case was made of American black walnut by the Herter Brothers of New York, for whom Searles had once worked, and is based on a case design by Hammatt Billings. The display pipes were manufactured from burnished Cornish tin. In 1881, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded, and the Boston Music Hall was their first home. The orchestra required a lot of space for the performers. With the rise in popularity of orchestral concerts, interest in organ recitals declined. The organ was removed to storage in 1884 and then sold for $5,000 to William O. Grover. Grover probably intended to donate the organ to the New England Conservatory of Music, but after his death circa 1897, it was auctioned to settle his estate. Searles purchased it at auction for $1,500 and began construction of a music hall in Methuen. In 1899, Searles hired noted church architect Henry Vaughan, an architect he frequently hired for various projects, to design a concert hall for the organ to be located on property he owned adjoining the Spicket River. Probably no other building of this size has been built solely to house a pipe organ. The exterior is brick in an Anglo-Dutch style, with an Italianate campanile and a gable with baroque volutes. The walls are over three feet thick with interior air gaps, making the building quite soundproof. The hall is designed in a similar fashion to a church, having a cross shaped floorplan; a long central aisle ends at a stage in front of the pipe organ; including the organ, the hall is approximately 100 feet (30 m) long. Another aisle runs across the front of the stage area and out to the sides; this is 70 feet (21 m) wide. In the terminology of Christian church architecture, the nave is 40 feet (12 m) wide while the transepts extend to 70 feet (21 m), and the pipe organ is in the chancel. There is a vaulted ceiling 65 feet (20 m) high. Beneath the vault is an entablature whose cornice hides indirect lighting which illuminates and reflects off the ceiling. There is also a catwalk where the vault of the ceiling meets the top of the walls. The total enclosed volume is over 300,000 cubic feet (8,500 m3), which gives a reverberation time of 4 seconds when the hall is empty.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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