Adam Smith Institute, Halls, Theatre, Centre.

Just some of the names that the postcard producers have used for the Adam Smith building in Kirkcaldy through the years, for the older folk it will always be called the Halls.
Our meetings are held in a building across the road from the Adam Smith Centre in St Brycedale Avenue.
Although some of the cards look the same look closely at the billboards they have different acts being advertised. Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, the only child of Margaret Douglas of Strathendry and his father, also called Adam Smith (1679-1723), a customs official.
Adam Smith died in Edinburgh in 1790 and is buried in the churchyard of Canongate, Edinburgh.
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Kirkcaldy Adam Smith and Beveridge Halls_1024x646_800x505On 10 June 1889, Provost Beveridge proposed, at a public meeting of the town council, to erect a memorial to Adam Smith. The memorial, he said, should take the form of a public hall with smaller halls connected, one of which would be a free library. Provost Beveridge died around this time but left a bequest of £50,000 to the town council to provide the town with a public park, a public hall and a public library.
The two ideas were subsequently combined into the building and park that exist today. The large hall became known as The Adam Smith Hall while the smaller hall was called the Beveridge Hall and Library.
In 1899, Andrew Carnegie gave a speech at the theatre’s opening and spoke of:
“A hall with a fine organ, and stage suitable for concerts, charades, private theatricals, meetings of philanthropic committees, lectures upon interesting and instructive topics and entertainments of all kinds, gives the means of gathering together and concentrating the scattered good individual impulses of the community into one solid mass from where wise and generous actions proceed.”
Major renovation work takes place in the 1970’s. In 1973, the inside of the theatre was greatly altered to host a top-level economic conference marking the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s birth.
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