This is a coffee table book put together by a landlord to promote his property.
It’s also a history of a 112-year-old Broadway theater with a glamorous and complicated past, written by a Tony-winning producer and author of several well-regarded books of theater history, among his many other accomplishments (which are detailed in a five-page author’s biography in the book.)
In “It Happened at the Palace: A History of New York’s Iconic Broadway Theater” (Broad Book Press, 208 pages), Stewart F. Lane traces the story of the Palace from a vaudeville house to a movie house to a showcase for Broadway musicals, highlighting the many headliners who could boast of “playing the Palace,” from Sarah Bernhardt to Bob Hope; Josephine Baker to Lauren Bacall, and of course Judy Garland to Liza Minnelli.
But the history of the Palace is also undeniably a story of New York real estate.
It is timed to the reopening of The Palace, after a six-year, $80-million dollar renovation that lifted the landmarked interior of the famed 1913 theater — all 14 million pounds of it — thirty feet in the air. This was in order to make room for a $2.5 billion-dollar tower called TSX Broadway, which features a mall in the two floors beneath the theater (which is now on the third floor) and a hotel above it – a project that’s detailed in the book’s seventh and final chapter. The book also has been published at a time when real estate is proving to be simultaneously a blessing and (increasingly) a curse to theaters throughout the city. Real estate always has featured prominently in the story of New York, and in the story — and struggle — of New York theater as well.
In his first chapter, after describing his first trip to Broadway at age 11 (“from that day forward, I was hooked.”) Lane details his decision two decades later, in 1980, to become co-owner with the Nederlanders of the Palace:
“The sad truth was, at the time, nobody else would go near such an offer considering the bleak outlook for the city’s economy, but this was New York City. It is a town that respects free enterprise and the pursuit of fortune – and not solely on Wall Street. Andrew Carnegie amassed much of his fortune in New York, as did the Vanderbilt, the Astors, J.P. Morgan, Flo Ziegfeld, as well as the Shuberts and the Nederlander family.”
It’s telling (although he doesn’t point it out) that, of the seven names he mentions, four made some or most of their fortunes specifically from New York real estate.
It was the Palace’s “premier location at Broadway and 47th Street” – “already bustling with businesses, theaters, eateries and retailers” and near “ample subway, taxi service and even trolleys” – that helped account for its success. But the location also caused problems for Martin Beck, the Hungarian immigrant who built the Palace, because of opposition to it by those with a stake in the theaters already in Times Square, including Oscar Hammerstein Sr. and E.F. Albee (the father of the famed lyricist and grandfather of the acclaimed playwright, respectively.) Beck, a former vaudeville actor, intended the Palace to offer vaudeville (a popular entertainment of the time that differed from Broadway fare; as Lane helpfully points out, it borrowed from “minstrel shows, music hall, saloons, dime museums, piano bars, Yiddish theater, and even the circus…to name a few.”) But Albee controlled a powerful circuit of vaudeville houses throughout the country, and threatened to ban from it any vaudeville acts who played the Palace – which forced Beck to enter into a “one-sided deal with Albee that would take 75 percent of control of the theater away from him.”
Albee got his comeuppance a couple of decades later from Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy family, who tricked Albee out of control of the Palace, selling it to the head of the movie studio RKO. The Palace became the RKO Palace, a movie house, in 1935 – which was its fate for the next three decades, although in the 1950s it would occasionally also showcase a live vaudeville show or star act, most notably Judy Garland.
It wasn’t until 1966, that the Palace presented its first big Broadway musical, “Sweet Charity,” having been bought the year before by the Nederlander family, who are now one of the three big landlords of Broadway. It’s serendipitous, and perhaps ironic, that most of the theaters that had competed with the Palace at its start had now disappeared, replaced by office buildings and hotels.
Lane recounts with some heat the demolition in 1982 of five old theaters to make room for one such hotel, over the protests of the entire theater community. “The silver lining to the story was that the plight of the fallen five and the outcry from those in the industry who opposed the demolition of these beacons of Broadway provided a new founded motivation for the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission to make a greater effort to prevent such future demolition by bestowing landmark status on many of the older Broadway theaters, including the Palace.”
The landmarking helps explain the painstaking and expensive project to keep the interior intact — an achievement recently lauded by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a non-profit advocacy group, that has chosen the Palace as one of four New York theaters to receive its preservation award next month.
“It Happened at the Palace” tries to place the story of this one theater building in the larger context of New York theater as a whole, and (despite the verb tense of the title) implicitly contemplates the future of the industry as well as chronicling its past. To that end, there is an unintentionally forward-thinking typographical error in a colorfully illustrated eight-page Broadway Timeline near the end of the book, which begins with the opening of “Arms and the Man” in 1894 (“the first of many George Bernard Shaw plays to open on Broadway”) and ends with the lifting of the Palace in 2022.
The entry for March 24, 2013 – 112 years ago next week – reads: “The Palace first opened in New York City. It since has been refurbished, renovated, and lifted, and is still going strong over 120 years later.”
