Vail-Leavitt Music Hall

18 Peconic Avenue

Narrator: David F. Vail (builder of Vail Music Hall), voiced by Richard Wines

Hello. This is David Vail. My son and I built this music hall here back in 1881. Would you believe that there were already three other music halls here in Riverhead at the time? We were really the center for entertainment for the East End. But my 300-seat upstairs Music Hall was the best – really the talk of the town, back in the day

We also owned a big lumberyard up on Griffing Avenue that is now the Railroad Museum of Long Island. People around here though some of my other ventures were rather unusual – especially when I tried to turn the old sail-powered battleship U.S.S. Ohio into a tourist attraction in Greenport. That ended with the ship on the bottom of Greenport harbor. It’s still there.

Back then, Peconic Avenue was called Bridge Street. It was the main route to the South Fork. It was the center of carriage making trade, with several companies operating nearby. Also just down the street was the fire department’s old Washington Company.

Matt Ammann’s handsome hardware store was on the other side of my building.

Over the ensuing decades my Music Hall hosted a wide variety of events ranging from Mozart concerts and high-minded lectures to mindless Vaudeville acts and dances that seemed to last all night.

Simon Leavitt acquired the building in 1908. He was one of founders of of the Jewish Brotherhood that eventually became Temple Israel. The Leavitt family operated a men’s clothing store in the downstairs spaces. Leavitt renamed my Music Hall the Lyceum Theater and for many years continued shows there.

Perhaps its most famous moment came in 1914 when it hosted a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s new “talking pictures.” The show might have included this short film called “The Musical Blacksmiths.”

The upstairs hall became a Chinese restaurant in the 1920s but after a fire damaged the stage area they used the theater mostly for storage until it was “rediscovered” and acquired by the Council for the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall in 1982.

Fortunately, the volunteer group has fully restored the building back to its original beauty. Hope you can come to a show here. It looks just like it did back in its glory days.