Venue: Rochester Opera House
Address: 31 Wakefield Street Rochester, NH 03867
Town: Rochester, US

The Rochester Opera House is a 750-seat theater in the city hall of Rochester, a city in Strafford County, New Hampshire, United States. It has the unique architectural feature of a fully moveable floor, perhaps the last of this design in existence. The Rochester Opera House was built in 1908, designed by George G. Adams. Adams built six other municipal buildings for cities around New England, including Waterville, Maine, Dover, New Hampshire, and Derry, New Hampshire. Construction costing nearly $62,000, the Rochester Opera House accommodated 1,012 people and featured a grand proscenium, intricate stenciling, murals, and a suspended horseshoe balcony. One of its most interesting features was its unique moving floor system. The floor of the opera house can be lowered to become a flat surface and be used for dances, town hall meetings, etc. or raised to a tilt for viewing shows. Adams equipped four different buildings with this flooring system. However, due to fires and other events, the Rochester Opera House is the only known theater in the United States to still use this type of flooring. It is truly an architectural treasure. Like most buildings, over time the Rochester Opera House started to deteriorate. Restoration plans for the opera house started in the mid 1980s fronted by the Rochester Heritage Trust and the Arts Rochester Organization. An early challenge facing these groups was to uncover and fully appreciate the mechanics present in the unique floor-moving system. Understanding such complexities was aided considerably by an extensive study finished in June 1985 by Nancy Alberto and Heidi Barrett, students of the Department of Civil Engineering Archived 2010-02-14 at the Wayback Machine at the nearby University of New Hampshire. Estimates for restoring the opera house and also establishing an endowment fund for maintenance and program scheduling ranged up to $1.2 million. Due to the enormity of the task and the size of the necessary costs, the first effort