1.10 - Grand Opera House on 23rd
Astaires Head to School in Building with Rich Manhattan History
After a few days of playing the tourist in 1905, it was time for the Astaires to focus on what had brought the family to Manhattan: training Adele and Fred as dancers and trying to break into show business. They walked three blocks west of the Flatiron Building down 23rd Street, in what had been the city’s theatrical center just a few decades earlier, to a dancing school in the Grand Opera House on the northwest corner of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue.
Originally called Pike’s Opera House, it had cost more than $1 million when built in 1868 by Samuel N. Pike, a distiller from Cincinnati. He had purchased the property in 1866 from Clement C. Moore, the grand old man of the Chelsea neighborhood and the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Pike developed plans to build a rival to the Academy of Music on 14th Street. His opera house would feature six rows of proscenium boxes, dazzling chandeliers and a broad marble staircase ascending from a main foyer with a checkerboard pattern created by slabs of black and white marble (Baral 88). Barely a year after its opening, the building was purchased by the notorious railroad stock manipulators Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, who moved the offices of their Erie Railroad operation to the fourth floor of the building and proceeded to install ostentatious decorations: black walnut inlaid with gold, crimson velour trimmings, rococo painted ceilings, and washstands decorated with frolicking nymphs and cupids (Baral 89). They also installed a $30,000 seven-story safe that ran from the basement to the roof and installed printing presses in the basement for new bond and stock issues (Renehan 152). There were secret stairways and a two-story mirror topped with a bust of Shakespeare in the grand foyer that concealed the entrance to the Fisk-Gould offices (Brands 6). Solid mahogany doors, 20-feet high, which cost $2,000 each, had the carved monogram (“ER”) of the Erie Railroad (“Praiseworthy Remodeling Project” 41). The building soon acquired the nickname “Castle Erie,” serving that purpose doubly, as Gould and Fisk (who was dubbed the “Prince of Erie”) stored gold in the safe when they tried to corner the market in 1869 and then barricaded themselves inside the building during the panic and riots that occurred after the crash on Friday, September 24, 1869.
Fisk had a covered passageway built from the rear of the Grand Opera House to a nearby apartment where he had ensconced his mistress, Josie Mansfield, who acquired the nickname the “Cleopatra of 23rd Street” (Baral 97). A few years later Mansfield had transferred her affections to Edward “Ned” Stokes, who on January 6, 1872, shot and killed Fisk on the ladies’ stairway inside the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway near Bleeker Street. Beginning on January 8, Fisk lay in state for four days in the vestibule of the Erie Railroad offices in the Grand Opera House. More than 10,000 people, entering from both the 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue doors, filed by the rosewood casket with its gold-plated handles to see Fisk laid out in his uniform as a colonel in the 9th Regiment of the New York Militia.
After Fisk’s death, Gould continued to operate the Grand Opera House, whose 1,800-seat theater presented light operas and an occasional play. By the early 1900s musicals, farces, and sporadic dramas would be staged, usually with short runs, as Manhattan’s theatrical center had shifted north first to Herald Square and then to Times Square. When the Astaires first came to the Grand Opera House, the musical The Girl from Kay’s was running in March, having moved there from its original fall run at the Herald Square Theatre on 35th Street. The show featured Elsie Ferguson and Maurice Lavigne, who would later appear with the Astaires at annual Actors Equity benefits in 1920 and 1921. Eventually the Grand Opera House’s theater would become part of the “Subway Circuit,” where shows from Broadway would be staged for a week after their initial Broadway run before hitting the road for tours outside of New York. Among such shows were The Ziegfeld Follies of 1907, George M. Cohan’s Fifty Miles from Boston, The Talk of New York, and Seven Keys to Baldpate. Ziegfeld’s first wife, Anna Held, appeared there in The Little Duchess in April 1902.
In November 1905, while the Astaires were preparing for their first professional vaudeville performances, an after-hours fire destroyed stage scenery and damaged the exterior of the Grand Opera House (“One Performance Postponed by Theatre Fire”). Ten years later, the Grand Opera House’s auditorium was converted to a movie theater. It was slated for demolition in 1937 but was converted to the RKO 23rd Street Theatre. Actually, it was the second RKO theatre on 23rd Street. The first had been the original Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre, two blocks away at 139 W. 23rd between Sixth and Seventh avenues. Architect Thomas Lamb Associates converted the old Grand Opera House into an ultramodern theater, removing much of the exterior ornamentation. It opened on August 4, 1938, and continued until June 15, 1960. The building was destroyed by fire on June 29, 1960. (A third RKO 23rd Street was built even farther west (Gabel).
Today the northwest corner has an entrance for the Eighth Avenue (A Train) subway. A few years later an urban strip mall was built on this corner and then topped by a satellite location of Mount Sinai Doctors Hospital. More than 30 years after living and learning on 23rd Street, Fred would appear with Ginger Rogers on the screens at these two RKO theaters. Roberta would play at the RKO Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in March 1935, and Carefree would be seen at the new RKO 23rd Street Theatre in October 1938.
SOURCES
Baral, Robert. Turn West on 23rd: A Toast to New York's Old Chelsea. New York: Fleet Publishing, 1965.
Gabel, William. RKO 23rd Street Theatre. n.d. 21 February 2019. <http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/563>.
“One Performance Postponed by Theatre Fire,” New York Evening Telegram 29 November 1905:7
"Praiseworthy Remodeling Project." Boxoffice 15 October 1938: 40-41. <https://archive.org/details/boxofficeoctdec13334unse>.
Renehan, Edward J. Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould. New York: Basic Books, 2005.