Mishler Theatre

Nine months after it opened, it burned. Isaac Charles Mishler, a railroad-town impresario, had commissioned Albert E. Westover to build him a Beaux-Arts playhouse in Altoona; it received its first audience on 15 February 1906, and later that year a fire in the building next door gutted the interior. Mishler rebuilt at once and reopened in 1907.

He announced his retirement in 1924 and sold the theatre in 1931. What followed is the usual American arc: vaudeville gave way to film, film gave way to television, and by 1965 the building was being discussed for demolition. It was bought instead by the Altoona Community Theatre together with the Blair County Arts Foundation, which set about repairing it. The reopening production in 1969 was "The Sound of Music". Listing on the National Register followed in 1973, a chandelier arrived from an MGM auction, and structural restoration in the 1990s ran past a million dollars.

The Altoona Community Theatre still runs it, and touring opera and orchestral companies pass through a house that has now outlived by a wide margin the man whose name it carries.