153 S Main St

From the National Register nomination

Two-story building of painted brick with a shed roof and stepped side parapets. The front parapet has a corbeled cornice and two signage panels, and the one-light second-story windows have jack arches. The remodeled storefront has plate glass windows and a recessed entry. The exposed north side elevation, which is described on Sanborn maps as a "hollow brick" wall, has a rough Flemish-bond appearance that may indicate rowlock cavity wall construction. There is a first rear addition of similar brick construction (but different color), and a third rearmost basement-level cinder block addition with a flue (possibly a boiler room). According to Ann McCleary, the Strand was built by Roth Enterprises about 1929. According to Scott Suter and Cheryl Lyon, the Strand opened in 1934 with a showing of The Last Trail. The Sanborn maps further complicate the story, for the 1930 map shows the building (with the present "hollow brick" north wall) but identifies it as "auto sales & service." An "auto show rm." of similar form occupied the site in 1924 with a rear tile block section that appears on subsequent Sanborn maps. It may be that the surviving rear tile block section dates to ca. 1920 and the front section was built in the late 1920s to serve as a theater but was used at first as an auto dealership, finally opening as the Strand Theatre in 1934. Joseph Nielsen of Nielsen Construction may have been the builder. In 1928 he contracted to build a theater for the Shenandoah Valley Theaters Corp. in Harrisonburg. The Strand closed and Prickett's stationery store moved in in the early 1950s. Now Mainstreet Bar & Grill. (Suter and Lyon, Images of America: Harrisonburg, 121; Wells and Dalton, Virginia Architects, 327)