1.16 - World’s Biggest Theater Opens Near Times Square
The Hippodrome Joins Crowd of Stages in 1905
In early April a block from Times Square, the world’s largest theater opened on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44thstreets: The Hippodrome. Under construction since 1904 by the Fuller Company (which also built the Flatiron Building, Macy’s at Herald Square, and the New York Times Building), the theater opened on Wednesday, April 12, after an auction of opening night tickets, with $575 being paid for one proscenium box ($575 for a Hippodrome Box). The theater included 40,000 lights and the world’s largest asbestos curtain (114 feet long and 48 feet high). The four-hour performance included “A Yankee Circus on Mars” (depicting a circus transported to Mars, including hundreds of acrobats, clowns, elephants, and equestrians), “The Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda and “Andersonville: A Story of Wilson’s Raiders,” including a Civil War battle scene with cavalrymen and horses plunging into a 14-foot tank. After the gala opening, the Hippodrome featured two daily performances at 2 and 8 p.m., and a school children’s matinee on Mondays at 3 p.m. Tickets ranged from 25¢ to $1.
The Astaires would appear only twice on the mammoth stage of the Hippodrome: Father McGean’s Annual Gala Concert for the Poor of the East Side on January 25, 1920, and the annual benefit for the National Vaudeville Artists on May 3, 1925.
The Shuberts leased the Hippodrome in 1906 (McNamara 43), and Charles Dillingham would produce shows there from 1915 to 1923. (Dillingham would snatch the Astaires from the Shuberts in 1919, giving them their first Broadway headliner status.) During the Great Depression the theater stopped presenting extravaganzas and offered a combination of movies and vaudeville. The last Hippodrome production was Billy Rose’s spectacle Jumbo (1935). The theater was closed and then demolished in 1939, with the site remaining vacant for a decade until an office building was erected there in 1952.
The Hippodrome was the just the latest (and largest) of the theaters opening near Times Square in the years just before the Astaires arrived in Manhattan. The theater district had been moving steadily northward for the past four decades. Union Square had been the theatrical center in the early 1860s, with others opening along 23rd Street and Madison Square in the 1870s, followed briefly by theaters near 34th street and Herald Square. By 1900 when planners decided that the center of the new subway system would lie along 42nd Street, it became clear that the new center for theaters (as well as hotels and restaurants) would be near Longacre Square, which was soon to be renamed Times Square. Starting with the Empire Theatre at 41st and Broadway in 1893 and Hammerstein’s Olympia at 44th and Broadway in 1895, more than a half dozen new theaters opened in the area from 1899 to 1905: the Victoria (1899) at 42nd and Seventh Avenue, the Republic (1900) at 207 W. 42nd St. , the New Amsterdam (1903) at 214 W 42nd, the Hudson (1903) at 139 W 44th, the Lyric (1903) at 213 W 42nd, the Lyceum (1903) at 149 W 45th, the Liberty (1904) at 234 W 42nd, Wallack’s (1904) at 254 W 42nd, and the Hippodrome (1905) at 44th and Sixth Avenue. Fifteen years later the Astaires would perform in major shows at the Lyric (For Goodness Sake – 1992), the Liberty (Lady, Be Good – 1924), and the New Amsterdam (The Band Wagon – 1931).
One of the first theaters to open above 34th Street, the Casino (1883) on the southeast corner of Broadway and 39th, was closed by a devastating fire on February 11, 1905, shortly after the Astaires had arrived in New York. The show running at the time was Lady Teazle, starring Lillian Russell. The Shuberts, who had taken over the theater in 1903, quickly rebuilt and reopened the Casino on November 4. The house would continue to present musicals or operettas until early 1930, when it was demolished.
SOURCES
"$575 for a Hippodrome Box." New York Times 9 April 1905: 14.
McNamara, Brooks. The Shuberts of Broadway: A History Drawn from the Collections of the Shubert Archives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.