Levy Opera House

In 1880, Jefferson Monroe Levy — congressman, real estate speculator, owner of Monticello — paid for the restoration of the building and named it the Levy Opera House. Eight years later he remodeled it to seat 800. The last performance was in 1912: the Imperial Russian Ballet.

The building had gone up in 1852 on Court Square — private money, intended as a town hall with an auditorium. It drew traveling shows; Jenny Lind sang there. During the Civil War, it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers brought in by rail, and a place where Confederate uniforms were stitched together. The Battery, the old parade ground where the building stood, had been a drill site for decades. In March 1865, when Federal troops occupied Charlottesville, General Philip Sheridan made his headquarters just north on Park Street, and his soldiers drilled on the same Battery where locals had mustered before them.

After 1912, the building changed hands, housed the Jefferson School for Boys, stood vacant, became apartments for men with extremely low incomes. The opera house is long closed, but the 1852 frame endures, brick and memory both, on the square where Jefferson sometimes attended services in the county courthouse that stood here before this one was built.