Manchester, NH City Tour

Yesterday, we spent the day exploring downtown Manchester, the largest city in NH. Among the places we visited were City Hall, the Palace Theatre, the Millyard Museum, Manchester Public Library, and famer’s market.

If you are a regular reader of The Frog & PenguINN blog, you know of our fondness for stopping into public libraries along our travels. Manchester’s main library is a massive building located on Pine Street, directly across from what is now Victory Park. Its made of Concord granite and marble. The library building was dedicated on November 1914, before an estimated crowd over 5,000 people, as the Elenora Blood Carpenter Building. It was named after the wife of the president of Amoskeag Paper Mill , Frank Pierce Carpenter, who donated funds for its construction in her memory.
We lunched at the locally famous Red Arrow Diner, which is reportedly one of the country’s top 10 diners. Since Grenville and are are natives of NJ, the nation’s diner capital, we had to check it out. We’re happy to report, lunch was delicious.
It was so good that we forgot to take photos before we gobbled it down. My lunch was the traditional burger, but with onion rings. Grenville tried a meat loaf club sandwich with fried.

There are no parking meters in the downtown Manchester, NH. Instead, the city uses a Pay to Park system, which requires that you prepay for up to a 2-hour maximum, cash or credit card. The hourly rate was steeper than Nashua by 25 cents, at 75 cents per hour.
The red phone booth in the photo above was near City Hall and it contained a working pay telephone. When was the last time you say one of these?

Located in downtown Manchester, just down from City Hall, is the Palace Theatre, an 840-seat non-profit performing arts center that hosts its own professional company.