PHOTO BY SEAN COLLIER

Last week, I was invited to visit the Casino Theatre in Vandergrift. If you find yourself in this small, upriver town, you can’t miss it; the center of Vandergrift is wrapped around the handsome building.

That’s been the case for 125 years. It’s one of the oldest theaters in the region — possibly the oldest, depending on what you count. It’s certainly one of the best-preserved; a painstaking, entirely volunteer effort has kept the building in good health while maintaining architectural charm. There are original details throughout (a tour of the Casino Theatre would be as interesting as any show), yet it’s comfortable and inviting.

The recently updated chairs here put those in several other historic theaters to shame. You can’t overstate the importance of comfortable chairs in an old theater; it’s the difference between “What an interesting place, but I don’t want to actually spend any time there” and “I will find any excuse to go there.”

The Casino Theatre is marking its anniversary next month, with a comedy show on June 21 headlined by Jim Krenn and featuring Mark Eddie and KDKA’s Larry Richert. Earlier in June and again in July, Armstrong Community Theater will present musicals on the theater’s big, sturdy stage.

That stage is so sturdy, in fact, that one early-20th-century production featured a dramatic entrance from a live elephant. Vaudeville legends, jazz greats and U.S. presidents have appeared here — in addition to decades spent as a movie theater, dating from the silent era into the ’90s.

The history is impressive; the building is impressive. But the important thing is what the preservation of the Casino Theatre says about the community.

I’ve written before about the need for small towns to embrace theaters and other performance spaces. In a profit-driven era, these types of inherently philanthropic endeavors can be unpopular. But the community building afforded by theaters of this ilk can’t be overstated; there is a vast difference between a place where people live and a community, and the people of Vandergrift seem to know that.

In this instance in particular, however, community sentiment had to back the preservation of this theater for more than a century. Plenty of towns in Western Pennsylvania have lost places like the Casino Theatre; some struggle to revive them, while others place historical markers where they once were and shrug their shoulders.

Here, however, money, sweat and time have been expended for decades in the name of preserving character and community, to a remarkable degree. Plenty of people and plenty of places build what is popular and current; it is exceptional to put that sort of effort into something with no goal of profit (or worse, property flipping).

If you’re near Vandergrift, go see that anniversary show or what I’ll bet is a delightful musical. Because there’s an easier, yet equally rare, element of community building: showing up as a patron. All of that effort requires the simple thank-you of showing up — of leaving our couches and food delivery on regular occasions to remember that we live in places, not just houses.