Mozart Theatre

Like the Winter Garden Theatre, the Mozart Theatre was designed by the local architectural firm of Freeburg & Fidler. George C. Freeburg and A. Howard Fidler formed their partnership in 1910, when Freeburg had been practicing for about four years and Fidler for less than a year.

Neither had extensive training in architecture. Freeburg had worked as a carpenter, mason, and painter before apprenticing in the offices of local architects, and Fidler had taken a course in architecture at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, a preparatory school, and also took a correspondence course. Nevertheless, their firm soon became one of the most successful in the region, with Freeburg being the principal designer and Fidler acting primarily as a supervising architect.

Unfortunately, the partnership ended with the premature death of Freeburg in November, 1916, at the age of thirty. Fidler then formed the firm of Phillips, Fidler & Beck with the established Warren, New York, architect Edward A. Phillips and the recent Cornell graduate Ellis W. Beck.

Freeburg & Fidler designed two theater projects for Dunkirk, New York, in 1915, but I haven’t been able to discover which theaters they were, or if they were ever completed. The successor firm of Phillips, Fidler & Beck designed a theater for a site at Main and Portage Streets in Westfield, New York, in 1917, but I’ve been unable to find out anything about it. It might have been a predecessor of the Grand Theatre, built at that intersection in 1941.