Fort Payne Opera House

Ornate 1889 opera house from Fort Payne's brief industrial boom

The Fort Payne Opera House was built in 1889 during the town's brief industrial boom, when speculators poured money into northeastern Alabama in hopes of founding a new industrial city. The building that resulted is far more elaborate than a town this size would normally produce — a Romanesque Revival structure with ornate stonework and a corner tower that still stands out on Gault Avenue North.

The opera house has survived various uses over the decades and is a National Historic Landmark. It's best appreciated from the outside as part of a walk through the Boom Town Historic District downtown, where several other well-built commercial buildings from the same period have also survived.

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A story
Fort Payne experienced a frenzied real-estate boom in the late 1880s, when investors convinced themselves the town would become the Pittsburgh of the South because of nearby iron deposits and a new rail connection. A thousand residents became ten thousand almost overnight, grand buildings went up, and an opera house seemed like a reasonable investment. Within three years the bust came, the investors left, and Fort Payne settled back into small-town life — but the buildings remained.