File:Lancaster Town Hall and Opera House, Lancaster, New York - 20200724.jpg

English: The Lancaster Town Hall and Opera House, 21 Central Avenue at Clark Street, Lancaster, New York, July 2020. Municipal government offices sharing space with performing arts venues was not an uncommon phenomenon in 19th-century America, as this handsome three-story 1896 edifice attests. Designed in a hybrid Italianate and Romanesque Revival style by Buffalo architect George J. Metzger, the round arches topping the third-floor windows, the rustication present around the deeply recessed and similarly round-arched entrance, and the rough texture of the Medina sandstone lintels and string courses are representative of the latter style, while the former style is hearkened back to in the detailing atop the central tower, namely the Classical pilasters and pediments framing the clock as well as the decorative brackets above the louvered windows. The town government has occupied the building continuously since its opening, but the Opera House fell into disuse in the 1930s with the opening of the auditorium at the new Lancaster High School building, only reopening in 1981 after a laborious six-year restoration process. In the intervening years, the space was used variously: first during the Great Depression as a storehouse for food aid to needy residents, then as a processing facility for World War II recruits, then as the headquarters for Consolidated Erie County Civil Defense, then as a workspace for the town recreation department. In 2014, the Lancaster Town Hall and Opera House was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property to the Central Avenue Historic District, comprising Lancaster's downtown core.