Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 3

 

[This is the third installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” covering my arrival and first day in Leningrad, the former imperial capital during the tsarist era when it was named Saint Petersburg—and which has been renamed Saint Petersburg now that the Soviet Union is no more. 

[Before introducing some of the city’s major historical sights—more will come in Part 4—I give a brief overview of the founding of Saint Petersburg by Tsar Peter the Great.  On our first evening in Leningrad, we also saw a performance by the internationally praised dance troupe, the Kirov Ballet.

[To those of you who are just coming on board the “Travel Journal,” I strongly recommend that you go back and start with Part 1, posted in 23 May, and catch the 26th’s Part 2 before encountering this installment of the chronicle.  I define and explain things in the journal as they come up, and I don’t reiterate the comments when the references show up again, so things will make much more sense if you read the journal in order.]

LENINGRAD, RUSSIAN SFSR (U.S.S.R.)

Friday, 16 April – 6:00 [p.m.] – Leningrad, Russian SFSR, U.S.S.R. [now Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation]

The plane trip was very interesting.  We met an ex-Russian from Moscow, now a New Yorker, who started a conversation with us and a Russian [Soviet] soldier.  [I have no recollection what we talked about!]

In Leningrad, after lunch, we went sight-seeing.  [Lunch was at our hotel, the Evropeiskaya in the center of the city at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Brodsky (now Mikhailovsky) Street.  Opened in 1875, the hotel, now called the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, has 266 rooms and suites.] 

We saw, from the outside, the Winter Palace and Hermitage, the fortress across the Neva River [the Peter and Paul Fortress; see 17 April, Part 4] and the stock exchange complex, the [Decembrists] Square, the Palace Square where the revolutions started, Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, the sport complex [probably the Kirov Stadium], the Admiralty Building, and Headquarters Arch.

[First, a quick overview of the city’s history.  Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, founded the city on the banks of the Neva River in 1703 as his “Window to Europe” (Окно в Европу – Okno v Yevropu).  The city was named for its founder: Saint Petersburg; Tsar Peter moved there while the city was still being built around him. 

[(The tsar lived in a single-story log house built for him in 1703 in the center of what would be the great city.  Later, he’d bring his bride, Tsaritsa Catherine [1684-1727, m. 1707; future Empress Catherine I; reigned: 1725-27], to live there with him.  It’s said that Catherine, born a commoner, cooked and cared for the children during this time.  The cabin [Домик Петра I – Domik Petra I] is preserved, encased in a brick pavilion near the Winter Palace.)

[In 1712, Peter declared Saint Petersburg the capital of Russia.  It became the center of the nation’s commerce, science, literature and the other arts, and architecture.  The city served as the capital of the Russian Empire, from 1713 to 1918, except for a short period between 1728 and 1730 when it was replaced by Moscow. 

[In 1914, to obliterate the Germanic-sounding original name (“Sankt-Peterburg” in Russian: Санкт-Петербург), the city was renamed Petrograd (“Peter’s City”; -grad is a shortened form of gorod [город], which means ‘city’ or ‘town’).  After the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow and in 1924, after Lenin’s death, renamed the city once again to Leningrad.  The city’s original name, Saint Petersburg, was restored in 1991.

[A peculiar fact about Leningrad:  It’s the only city I can think of where someone could have been alive for all of its historical names.  If a man was born in, say 1906, he’d have been born in Saint Petersburg.  If he lived till he was 85, he’d have lived in Petrograd after he was 8; then Leningrad when he turned 18; and finally Saint Petersburg again on his 85th birthday.  That’s three name-changes over a lifetime.

[The Winter Palace (Зимний Дворец – Zimniy Dvorets) was the residence of the Tsars from Peter I through Nicholas II (1868-1918; reigned: 1894-1917), the last emperor of Russia—with the exception of Tsar Peter II (1715-30; reigned: 1727-30), who moved the court to Moscow from 1728 to 1730; it was returned to Saint Petersburg by Empress Anna (1693-1740; reigned: 1730-40), a niece of Peter the Great.  The current building was built in 1762.

[After the 1917 revolution, the Winter Palace became the seat of the provisional government of the Russian Republic.  Later that year, the Bolsheviks seized power, deposed the democratic government of Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970; Minister-President of the Russian Republic: September-November 1917), and sacked the palace.  In 1918, Lenin moved the capital to Moscow and the Kremlin.

[In October 1917, the palace was declared to be part of the Hermitage public museums.  I’ll detail the Hermitage and its collection below (see 18 April, Part 4) when we actually went inside the museum.

[The Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange (Санкт-Петербургская Биржа – Saint Petersburg Bourse) was constructed between 1805 and 1810.  Inspired by the Temple of Hera at Paestum, Greece, it’s situated in an architectural complex located on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island. 

[After the 1917 revolution and Russia came under the communist economic system, the building ceased to function as a stock exchange; since private ownership of a business, or of a share in a business, was prohibited, there were no longer stock exchanges in the Soviet Union. 

[In 1939, the old Stock Exchange building housed the Central Naval Museum until 2010.  When the Naval Museum was moved to a new location, the building was transferred from federal to city ownership and as of 2013, the exchange building has become part of the Hermitage Museum complex to house the heraldry collection.

[On the Neva, opposite the exchange building, is a semicircular overlook with circular ramps descending to the river.  The ramps are framed by two Rostral Columns centered on the front of the Stock Exchange. The columns are made of brick coated with red stucco and decorated with bronze anchors and four pairs of bronze ship prows, known as rostra.

[Decembrists Square, called Senate Square from 1763 to 1782 and Peter’s Square (because of the erection of a bronze equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as the Bronze Horseman) from then to 1925, was so named to honor the memory of the Decembrist revolutionaries who on 14 December 1825 staged a revolt against tsarist autocracy, which was brutally suppressed by Nicholas I (1796-1855; reigned: 1825-55). 

[The uprising, perpetrated by some 3,000 military officers who supported the succession of Grand Duke Constantine (1779-1831) to the throne of Alexander I over the Grand Duke’s younger brother, Nicholas, took place before the Senate on Peter’s Square.  It was immediately suppressed and the conspirators were hanged, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia.

[In 2008, the square reverted to the name Senate Square.  (The senate referred to in the plaza’s name is the so-called Ruling Senate of the Russian Empire; the upper house of the modern Russian legislature, the Federal Assembly, is the Federation Council.)

[Saint Petersburg was frequently the scene of major revolutionary events.  I’ve already mentioned the December 1825 abortive uprising of the Decembrists against Tsar Nicholas I, which took place in what later became Decembrist Square.  Palace Square was the site of the inception of several later uprisings and revolts.

[On 9 January 1905, some 3,000 to 50,000 demonstrating workers marched peacefully to the Winter Palace to present Tsar Nicholas II a petition for several desired reforms.  The Imperial Guard fired on the marchers in what became known as Bloody Sunday (Кровавое Воскресенье – Krovavoye Voskresenye); 143-234 demonstrators were killed, 439-800 injured, and 6831 arrested. 

[Bloody Sunday began the Revolution of 1905 (1905-07), sometimes called the First Russian Revolution, which resulted in the defeat of the revolutionaries, Nicholas II keeping his throne (until 1917), the enactment of a constitution, the passage of some reforms, and the establishment of the State Duma (legislature).

[The Revolution of 1917, which also started in what was by then Petrograd, was really a series of two revolutions and a civil war.  During World War I (July 1914-November 1918), in which the Russian Empire was an ally of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, an apparently spontaneous uprising of an uneasy alliance of republicans and socialists began on 8 March 1917. 

[Known as the February Revolution (because it took place in February under the old, Julian calendar still in use in Russia at the time, designated Old Style or OS), it ended on 18 March (according to the Gregorian calendar, used by most of the rest of world, New Style or NS) with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the establishment of the Russian Republic under the Provisional Government headed by Aleksandr Kerensky.

[On 6 November on the new calendar (NS), corresponding to 24 October (OS), Lenin arrived in Petrograd and the next day declared that his Bolshevik (‘Majority’) arm of the Communist Party had usurped the power of the Provisional Government.  On Lenin’s orders, the battleship Aurora opened fire on the Winter Palace, signaling the soldiers and workers to storm the palace, initiating the October Revolution (so called because of the Old Style dating system). 

[The Russian Republic would become the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in July 1918, but the October Revolution simultaneously started the Russian Civil War, the struggle between the Reds (communists) and the Whites (a loose confederation of anti-communist forces that included monarchists, capitalists, and social democrats).  The Civil War lasted until 1923, culminating in the communist victory and the establishment, in 1922, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[Saint Isaac’s Cathedral is the fourth consecutive church standing at this spot.  It’s dedicated to Saint Isaac the Confessor (4th century CE), a patron saint of Peter the Great, who was born on the saint’s feast day.  The Soviet regime turned it into a museum in 1931 (though religious services have been held in a side chapel since the 1990’s).  Located on Saint Isaac’s Square (just west of Senate Square), the current cathedral was built by Alexander I from 1818 to 1858.

[I didn’t note the sports center we visited on the 16th; there are two in the city.  One is the Mikhailovsky Manege (so named because it was a riding academy for a time in the early 19th century) that became the Winter Stadium (Zimniy Stadion) in 1949.  It served many functions over its history, but I think the place we visited was the Kirov Stadium, a multi-purpose stadium and one of the largest anywhere in the world.

[Located on Krestovsky Island on the coast of the Gulf of Finland in northwest Leningrad, the stadium was built starting in 1932 and opened in 1950.  It held 100,000 people, including 16,000 standing places.  The Kirov Stadium was demolished in 2006 and the Krestovsky Stadium was built on the site and opened in 2017.

[The Admiralty Building, one of Leningrad’s oldest and most important buildings, is the architectural center of the city; it sits at the point where Leningrad’s three main streets, Mayorov (now Voznesensky) Prospect, Dzerzhinsky (now Gorokhovaya) Street, and Nevsky Prospect, converge like the center of a star’s rays.  With its gilded spire topped by a golden weather vane shaped like a small sail warship, it’s one of the city’s most conspicuous landmarks.

[Situated on the south bank of the Neva between Palace Square to the east and Decembrists Square to the west, the Admiralty was built in 1706 by Peter the Great as the fortified shipyard that built the nascent Russian Navy.  The original structure was made of wood, eventually replaced by masonry buildings; the current edifice was constructed during the reign of Alexander I between 1806 and 1823.

[Shipbuilding was moved to another location on the Neva by the 1840s and the complex was taken over by the navy.  It was the Ministry of the Navy until 1917 when it served as a rallying center for the tsarist forces during the revolution.  It’s the current headquarters of the Russian Navy.

[On the south side of Palace Square is the monumental General Staff Building (built in 1819-29).  It’s constructed in two wings which are joined by a triumphal arch called the Headquarters Arch adorned with a bronze statue of a Roman racing chariot drawn by four horses.]

Tonight we go to a ballet.

[The ballet we saw—I kept the ticket stub!—was Seven Beauties (Семь красавиц – Sem’ krasavits) by Soviet Azerbaijani composer Gara Garayev (also spelled Kara Karayev; 1918-82).  It was presented by the world-renowned Kirov Ballet (now renamed the Mariinsky Ballet) at the Maly (Little) Theater of Opera and Ballet.

[Sidelight: Back in the Soviet times, the official Russian names of institutions—of any kind, not just arts organizations—were often immensely complicated on political grounds.  The dance troupe known to the world simply as the Kirov Ballet was formally the Leningrad Order of Lenin State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet named after S(ergei). M(irinovich). Kirov (Ленинградский государственный ордена Ленина академический театр оперы и балета имени С. М. Кирова). 

[The Order of Lenin was the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union.  Institutions and organizations that received the order incorporated its name into their official titles.  “Academic theater” was an honorary title awarded to the biggest and oldest state theaters in the Soviet Union; it’s still used today in Russia and other former Soviet states. 

[“State theater” was the designation of a theater authorized by the Soviet state and regulated and subsidized by the government.  Today (and in tsarist Russia before the revolution), there are independent and municipal theaters, but even during the Soviet era, a small number of independent theaters sprang up, often associated with university student groups, and allowed to operate under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Culture and the security police. 

[(Such independent theaters could be awarded state status and receive a government subsidy, either as a reward for following ministry guidelines successfully or in order to bring them under the control of the government [see the early history of the Nikitsky Gate theater in “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020].  Along with the subsidy came continued strict censorship, and the de facto selection of the theater’s leadership by the culture ministry.)

[The name-change to Mariinsky Ballet in 1992 was made because Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), having no connection to dance or the arts, was a hero of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and a personal friend to Joseph Stalin.  His assassination in 1934 was Stalin’s excuse for the Great Purge of 1937.

[Composed in 1947-48 to mark the 800th anniversary of classical Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (c. 1141-1209), Seven Beauties is based on the 1197 narrative poem of the same title.  The story’s on a popular theme in Islamic poetry, the ill-starred lovers, and shares many plot elements with both Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk.]

[The fourth part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” will come out on Wednesday, 1 June.  It starts with the entry for 17 April 1965 and the return of my Hungarian visa problem (see Part 1).  We visited Leningrad’s Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral, as well as doing some souvenir shopping of a very Soviet nature.

[Please come back to ROT for the continuation of my account of my high school trip through the Soviet Union.  In addition to the historical sights and the shopping, we also paid a visit to the world-famous Hermitage Museum and had a chance to see a very special collection of European art.]

Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 2

 

[Below is the second part of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965.”  If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 23 May, I recommend that you do that before starting with Part 2. 

[In this installment, I end my visit to Warsaw and my school group flies on to Moscow in the Soviet Union.  We’d been in Warsaw for 2½ days and we’d be in Moscow for 3 days before moving on to Leningrad.

[Since I broach the subject of Russian food, ROTters will find that I’ve allowed myself a little digression to recount an anecdote about borsht that took place in 1970, five years after I visited the Soviet Union.]

Thursday, 15 April – 11:30 p.m. – Warsaw/Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, U.S.S.R. [now Russian Federation]

On Tuesday [the 13th] after breakfast, we saw Vilanova [Wilanów], a large palace, like a cheap Versailles [which I had visited on Christmas Day, 1962—my 16th birthday; see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1,” 9 March 2013].  Then we saw an art (sculpture) museum.  Before Vilanova we went to the Chopin Museum.

[Wilanów Palace is a former royal palace, completed in 1696, and one of Poland’s most important monuments.  The palace’s museum, established in 1805, is a repository of the country’s royal and artistic heritage. 

[The Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, opened in 1965 in the rebuilt historic Królikarnia (The Rabbit House), a palace erected between 1782 and 1786, is now a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw.  It’s dedicated to sculptor Xawery Dunikowski (1875-1964), a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.  The Fryderyk Chopin Museum was established in 1954 and dedicated to the Polish composer (known as Frédéric Chopin, 1810-49).]

MOSCOW, RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC (U.S.S.R.)

After lunch, we went to the airport and flew to Moscow [on LOT Polish Airlines].  The trip was uneventful.  We had dinner on the plane.

[In the years I lived in Europe and flew around frequently between European cities and various U.S. destinations, I kept a mental list of airlines on which I flew and airports where I landed or took off.  This trip was “uneventful” as far as the flight itself was concerned—but I added a new carrier to my list, LOT, and Warsaw-Okecie Airport (renamed Warsaw Chopin Airport in 2001).

[Later, I’d also add Aeroflot, the flag carrier of the U.S.S.R., and the main airports of Moscow (Sheremetyevo International Airport, renamed in 2019 in honor of poet Alexandr Pushkin, 1799-1837), Leningrad (Shosseynaya Airport, renamed Pulkovo Airport in 1973), and Kiev (probably Boryspil Airport, but I’m not sure).]

In Moscow, after a second dinner at the airport, we went to our hotel where we played Mr. Brunst’s “room game.”  [Obviously, this had to do with assigning hotel rooms (at the Boukharest, near Red Square; originally built in 1898 and taking the name Boukharest, or Bucharest, in 1957, though only the façade remains from the original building; it has 227 rooms and now goes by the name Baltschug Kempinski) and giving out keys, but if there was a gag here, I don’t remember what it was.]

Next morning [Wednesday, the 14th], breakfast was lousy.

[This was to be a constant in the Soviet Union: the food was universally unprepossessing.  Except the hard candy on the planes—excellent!—and the ice cream—plain (vanilla), but delicious.  Go know!

[Russia has never been known for its cuisine.  There are some dishes considered exceptional, such as blini and chicken Kiev or veal Prince Orloff, but they’re heavily influenced by French cooking from the days when Russian society modeled itself after the French, largely the 17th-through-19th centuries.]

[A Sidebar: One domestic dish, really “peasant” food, stands out: borsht (борщ [borshch] in Russian).  I don’t mean the red, beet-based cold soup, which is quite wonderful in its own right, but it’s actually Polish or Ukrainian.  I mean true Russian borsht, a beef-based, heavy soup with veggies and potatoes that’s a whole meal in a pot.

[Made by the right hands, it’s plain but delicious.  In some rural Russian homes, such as farms, a pot of borsht sits on the stove pretty much all the time.  Left-overs from other meals are often just scraped into the pot so that it’s almost never emptied.

[When I was in the army Russian-language course at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I helped make a large pot of authentic borsht under the tutelage of one of our teachers, Vera Vetrova.  The occasion was one of two “picnics” set aside in the year-long course for the class to socialize together away from the classrooms.

[Every language class at DLI-West Coast had a scheduled picnic—shorter courses had only one—which the class could plan any way they wanted.  Our second one was just a sort of afternoon off to hang around the Presidio of Monterey, where DLIWC is based, and enjoy the sight of Monterey Bay below us as we threw around a baseball, football, or frisbee. 

[But for the first one, we chose to have a true Russian meal, prepared by Gospozha (Mrs.) Vetrova and her section—she had the top section that week—in the International Kitchen on the post for just this kind of activity.  Gospozha Vetrova had pre-made sladkoye (‘sweets’), in this case pirozhki with sweet fillings instead of ground meat, mashed potato, or mushrooms.  While the sladkoye baked, Gospozha Vetrova guided us through the making of the borsht.

[We discovered immediately that the one thing we needed most wasn’t included in the generally fully-equipped kitchen.  There was no pot large enough to make borsht for the whole class, perhaps 50 soldiers, marines, and sailors, plus our teachers.  Someone was going to have to borrow a large soup pot from the Presidio officers’ club.

[The problem was that of the class, only three of us were officers.  Of the three, only one was an army officer.  Guess who!  That’s right; I was the only member of the class who was a member of the Presidio O-club.  (The other two officers, who were in different sections anyway and weren’t at the kitchen with Gospozha Vetrova, were naval lieutenants, temporarily assigned to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey so they could attend the Russian course.)

[So I walked over to the O-club, signed out the pot—which is why the borrower had to be a member—and brought it back to the kitchen building.  We made the borsht, had our picnic, and everyone went home except the cooking team, who stayed to clean up.

[Everything was fine—except one small thing.  We hadn’t eaten all the borsht.  We over-made it and there was left-over soup.  We couldn’t return the pot with borsht in it.  There was too much to just eat the remaining soup.  It was too good to throw out!  So, what to do?

[Well, I cajoled the remaining class section to take some back to the barracks—they had a communal fridge, but it had limited space, being shared, as it was, by a hundred or so enlisted servicemen.  So, since I owned the pot, I had to take the rest home to my off-post apartment so we could wash the pot and I could take it back to the O-club and sign it back in.

[For almost the whole rest of the course, I had small containers of borsht in my freezer.  I’d take one out and let it thaw in the fridge and heat up a bowl every afternoon when I got home from class as an after-school snack.  I’d invite some of my classmates over to help me eat the borsht up, but that was hard since it was officially “fraternizing,” a no-no by army regs. 

[I can’t say I suffered much from chowing down on my private stash of home-made, authentic Russian borsht.  It made a wonderful after-school nosh.  Occasionally, I’d gussy it up with a spoonful of sour cream, but it didn’t need the help.

[My one regret is that while we were putting the soup together, I carefully noted the ingredients as Gospozha Vetrova instructed us to add them to the pot . . . but I didn’t get the proportions.  I still have the list of ingredients, but I never made the borsht at home because I never tried to figure out how much of each ingredient to put in. 

[I wish I’d asked Gospozha Vetrova for the actual recipe while I had the opportunity—she was always helpful when we had any kind of question on any tangential topic—but, tragically, she died during the course and I never got the chance.

[Vera Vetrova was a wonderful woman and a terrific teacher.  My Russian class (February 1970-February 1971) was the last one at DLIWC with a full complement of teachers who were either born in Russia/the Soviet Union or whose parents had been. 

[A few of our teachers grew up outside Russia—one was born in Yugoslavia of Russian parents and another grew up in, of all places, Manchuria.  The class behind ours had mostly teachers who were born and grew up in the U.S.—San Francisco, a short drive north of Monterey, had a large Russian community—and Germany.

[Gospozha Vetrova had been a Russian teacher in the Soviet Army; she taught Russian to Russians.  (Actually, many Soviet soldiers were from republics where Russian wasn’t the first language: Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia.)  She was, as I said, always open to questions and she helped students with work outside the curriculum.  A couple of my classmates and I, for instance, bought a Russian-language Scrabble game, and she helped us learn to play in Russian until we got confident enough to play on our own.

[One assignment was for each of us to compose some kind of oral presentation in Russian and deliver it to the class.  Most did a translation of song lyrics or a short monologue of some kind, using the simplest language.  A classmate and I took on a much more challenging idea.  We decided to do a Meeting of Minds scenario (the Steve Allen talk show with historical figures that had its prototype première in the 1960s) with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

[It was based on their writings and we found passages where they talked about the same things and made it seem like the two communist thinkers and revolutionaries were having a conversation.  Gospozha Vetrova helped us find sources—the Presidio had a decent little library of foreign language books on a wide selection of topics—and then advised us on turning the writings into speech.  I think she actually liked helping us with this project.  (I still have the manuscript.)

[Sometime in the middle of the course, Gospozha Vetrova had a car accident.  She was reported to be recovering and would be rejoining the course.  A few days later, though, we learned that she had died suddenly.  Obviously, Gospozha Vetrova wasn’t a young woman—but she wasn’t old, either.  I’d say she was in her 60’s, maybe even only late 50’s.  She was our only teacher who’d been a language teacher in her previous career.  (The head teacher in our group, Gospodin Yablokov, had been a Soviet Army colonel, for instance.)  We were very sad and we missed her a great deal.]

Two people were sent home for misbehavior.  [I don’t recall what this was about.]

On the tour we saw Red Square, the Bolshoi Theater, the University, a Pioneer Palace, and did some souvenir shopping.  After dinner we saw a ballet at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.  We took a Metro home.

[For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t mention our visit to the Kremlin (Кремль [kreml’] – Russian for ‘fortress’), so I’ll fill in the gap a little here.  The Kremlin, built in the 15th century, and many of the buildings within it such as the Great Kremlin Palace, the Tsar’s former Moscow residence and now the official residence of the President of the Russian Federation and a museum, and the four cathedrals within the Kremlin walls, was a major stop.  The walled compound was the seat of government of the U.S.S.R. (and today’s Russian Federation), the equivalent of the whole of Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill.

[On the southeastern end of Red Square sits Saint Basil’s Cathedral, recognizable the world over from its nine multi-colored onion domes; it was built in the 16th century by Tsar Ivan the Terrible (aka: Ivan IV, 1530-84; Grand Prince of Moscow: 1533-47; first Tsar of All Russia: 1547-84).  Officially called the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed, it was secularized in 1929 and serves as a museum today (though since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Orthodox services have been restored since 1997).

[Red Square is the heart of Moscow.  Dating from the late 15th century during the rule of Tsar Ivan the Great (aka: Ivan III, 1440-1505; reigned: 1462-1505), the 18⅓-acre square (800,000 sq. ft.) has served many purposes over the centuries, from marketplace to coronation site to parade ground.  One interesting fact is where the name came from. 

[Most people, I think, believe that Red Square’s name is derived from the Communist Party’s and the Soviet Union’s association with the color red.  In a sense, it’s actually the other way around.  From the 17th century onward, some two centuries after the square was formed and almost three before the rise of Bolshevism, Muscovites began calling the square by its current name, Krasnaya Ploshchad (Красная Площадь) in Russian. 

[The name’s derived from the word krasnyi (красный), which meant ‘beautiful’ in Old Russian (krasivyi [красивый] in modern Russian) and only later came to mean ‘red.’  The name given to the plaza was actually Beautiful Square; only later, when the Russian word split into two cognates, did the designation’s English translation became Red Square.

[The Bolshoi (Grand) Theater, officially the Bolshoi Academic Theater—nearby is the Maly (Little) Academic Theater; many Russian cities have this pairing—houses ballet (the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet) and opera performances.  The current building, Moscow’s biggest theater (2,000 seats), opened in 1825, but the company was authorized in 1776 by Empress Catherine the Great (aka: Catherine II, 1729-96; reigned: 1762-96).  (We didn’t see a performance, just the empty theater.)

[Founded in 1755, Moscow State University—formally the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, named for Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65), a Russian polymath, scientist, and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science—is the oldest and largest Soviet institute of higher learning.  Among its graduates have been writers such as poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), novelist and playwright Ivan Turgeniev (1818-83), and playwright and short story-writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), as well as prominent diplomats, politicians, musicians, singers, historians, scientists, and mathematicians.

[The Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union was a communist party-run organization for children.  They joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.  Ostensibly, the Young Pioneers, founded in 1922, were analogous to the Boy Scouts, but it was an organization for indoctrination, along with its sports programs and other activities.  Membership was virtually mandatory as the Young Pioneers and the Young Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth.

[The Young Pioneer Palace in Moscow, now called the Palace of Child and Youth Creativity, was built in 1959-63 and consisted of seven buildings when I was there.  It covers 133½ acres and includes facilities for dozens of creative, sport, and extracurricular activities. 

[The Kremlin Palace of Congresses, opened in 1961, is a large, contemporary building faced with white marble inside the Kremlin.  Built of glass and concrete as a modern arena for Communist Party meetings, it contrasts sharply with its historic setting.  Intended for mass state events like party congresses, it’s now used for official gatherings and popular concerts. 

[The Palace of Congresses, which had what was then labeled the world’s biggest stage (there are a lot of superlatives in Soviet tourist guides), often played host to the Bolshoi dance and opera troupes, as well as visiting artists from abroad.  We saw a performance that was described as “one-act ballets” (одноактные балеты) but I don’t recall any details.

[The Moscow Metro, opened in 1935, is world-renowned for the décor of its platforms and street entrances, a tourist attraction in itself.  As of 2021, excluding the Moscow Central Diameters and the Moscow Monorail, it has 287 stations and covers 271 miles, making it the fifth-longest subway system in the world.  The Metro is closed for maintenance from 1:00 a.m. to about 5:30 a.m. 

[Stations constructed under the regime of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and de facto leader of the country: 1922-52), were designed as underground “palaces of the people” in the style of socialist classicism.  Some stations built between 1935 and 1955, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971; First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1953-64) put a stop to what he called “excesses,” had elaborate decoration and large chandeliers.]

Today [Thursday, the 15th] we had a better breakfast and then saw the Armory and Lenin’s Tomb and Gum (ГУМ).  The afternoon was free.

[The Kremlin Armory is one of the oldest museums of Moscow.  It started as the royal arsenal in 1508, but after the tsar’s capital was transferred to Saint Petersburg in 1713, it served a number of other functions until Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825; reigned: 1801-25) designated the Armory as the first public museum in Moscow in 1806.  The collections weren’t opened to the public until seven years later.  

[The current building was erected in 1844-51.  In 1960, the Armory became the official museum of the Kremlin, displaying Russian and European artifacts from the 12th to the 18th centuries, such as thrones, carriages, bejeweled harnesses, arms and armor, crowns of the tsars and tsaritsas, and tapestries; the museum also holds arms and armor from Persia and Turkey.

[On the southwest side of Red Square (which runs northwest to southeast) is the eastern wall of the Kremlin.  It served as the Soviet Union’s National Cemetery, known as the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, from 1917 to 1985, the burial site for heroes who died for the Soviet Union.  

[In front of the necropolis is the Lenin Mausoleum in which the preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924; Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic: 1917-24; Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union: 1923-24) is displayed in a glass coffin.  The line to get into the tomb is very long, and, of course, keeps moving because it’s not customary to stop at the coffin, even back in ’65 when the U.S.S.R. was still enduring.  It’s still a major tourist attraction.

[Until 1961, just 3½ years before I was there, Stalin, Lenin’s successor and the Soviet Union’s World War II (called there the Great Patriotic War) leader, was also interred in the mausoleum.  During Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program (approximately 1953-64), the body of his predecessor was moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.  The gravesite is marked only with a bust of Stalin; his name is not inscribed anywhere.

[Along the northeast side of the square is the former department store GUM (pronounced goom, to rhyme with ‘room’).  Believe it or not, this was one of the sights that made the most impression on me; it was sort of emblematic of the Soviet Union for me. 

[GUM was an acronym for Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín (Государственный Универсальный Магазин), or State Universal (that is, ‘Department’) Store; since 1991, the name has been Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin (Главный Универсальный Магазин), literally Main Universal Store).

[GUM is huge: with a frontage of 794 feet, it offers 743,000 square feet of floor space over three stories.  Today it’s a shopping center, but such things barely existed in the West in 1965, and in the Soviet Union, they’d have been anathema as hotbeds of commercialism and capitalism.  The place was (apparently always) crowded with shoppers.

[One problem, though: there was nothing to buy, to speak of.  The “shoppers” were mostly “searchers” or “hopers.”  The shelves and racks and display cases were pretty much empty or, at most, sparsely stocked.  There were some drab coats (out of season for early spring—but in the U.S.S.R., you bought what you might need when it was offered. 

[(Compare this description of GUM to my description of the No. 1 Department Store in Shanghai, China, in 1980 in “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2,” 27 December 2021; Rick On Theater: Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2.)

[The old building—built in the 1890s in what was called the Russian Revival style, using elements of Russian medieval architecture and 18th-century design and decorative elements popularized by Tsar Peter the Great (aka: Peter I, 1672-1725; reigned: 1682-1725).  But the interior looked like a huge warehouse. 

[That was what the Soviet Union seemed to me: lots of hype about the needs of the workers, but almost no amenities and precious little upkeep.  Things were clean, but not really “cared for.”  On the streets, for instance, were battalions of old women sweeping the gutters with old-fashioned besoms, but there were almost no cars on the roadways and nothing in the shops.  Consumer goods were virtually nonexistent.]

This evening, we saw the Moscow circus.  Again Metro home.  Tomorrow we take a plane to Leningrad [now Saint Petersburg].

[Russian circuses, like the Moscow State Circus, are world famous, for several reasons of which the quality of the acts is only one.  First, Russian circuses aren’t all traveling ones, like they are in the U.S. and even Western Europe.  Many perform in permanent buildings, not tents, and have remained in their home bases for decades, even centuries.

[The acts are fairly traditional—acrobats, animal acts, clowns, and so on—but there are real stars among them, attractions that Russians from all over the country come to see.  I’m not a great lover of circuses—I’ve been to a Cirque du Soleil once and that’s enough for me—but the phenomenon of the Moscow circus was fascinating. 

[The Moscow State Circus, a prominent part of Soviet culture and a point of pride, was the Soviet Union’s largest.  It predates the revolution (founded in 1880), but, like many such institutions, was nationalized in 1919.  (It was privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union.  There is a modern company in a brand-new building that’s designated the Moscow State Circus, but it wasn’t opened until 1971, six years after I was in Moscow.)]

P.S.  At the Pioneer Palace I met a young Russian girl who was very interested in America and American schools and people.  [You never knew, back in the bad old days, when someone was a plant, an informer, or an agent provocateur.  Some were even genuinely curious.  Sometimes, Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said, a cigar is just a cigar.]

[I hope all you readers will return to Rick On Theater to read the next installment of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965.”  Part 3 will be posted on Sunday, 29 May, and will start with my entry of 16 April 1965, our arrival in Leningrad. 

[In addition to seeing some of the main historical sights of the former imperial capital of the Russian Empire, I give a précis of the city’s founding and history.  We also saw another ballet, this one by a Soviet Azerbaijani, performed by the world-renowned Kirov Ballet.]

Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965 – Part 1

 

[In early April 1965, the International School of Geneva, known as Ecolint (from its French name, École Internationale de Genève), where I finished high school (see “Going to a Swiss International School,” my six-part post on Rick On Theater, 29 April-14 May  2021), organized a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (the subject of Part 5 of the referenced post, 11 May 2021).  I jumped at the opportunity and signed up.  The group included 32 student travelers and one Ecolint teacher as chaperone.  (His name was Mr. Brunst, but I don’t remember him at all!) 

[I had been trying to learn Russian for a few years.  A teacher at my New Jersey prep school had gathered some interested students for a non-credit, extra-curricular class in the language, but we hadn’t gotten beyond learning the alphabet.  A teacher at Ecolint did the same thing—we even had a textbook—but we hadn’t gotten very far by the time the trip came along.

[Aside from semi-regular hand-outs and documents we had to fill out and turn in—some for Ecolint and some for the various embassies concerned—our first order of business was applying for visas for all the countries we were going to visit (Poland, the U.S.S.R., and Hungary) or pass through (Austria and Czechoslovakia).  This being an international school, all of us already had valid passports, of course—otherwise we couldn’t have been in Geneva.

[The trip included Warsaw, Poland, for a couple of days, and then a week in the U.S.S.R.  That part of the trip, the main attraction, comprised visits to Moscow and Leningrad (now renamed—or, really, re-renamed Saint Petersburg), Russia, and Kiev (now officially called Kyiv since 1991), Ukraine.  The group went from Kiev to Budapest, Hungary, and then on to Vienna, Austria, before returning to Geneva.

[I immediately ran into a problem, the repercussions of which were to be considerable.  You see, my father was a member of the Consular Corps, an official status just below that of the Diplomatic Corps.  I, therefore, carried an Official Passport (maroon cover instead of turquoise, which was the color of U.S. tourist passports then; Diplomatic Passports—known to foreign service brats like me as “dip cards”—had black covers).  The Hungarian embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, wouldn’t issue a visa for an Official Passport; my application had to be forwarded to the foreign ministry in Budapest for action.

[The other embassies had made some waves, but ultimately issued the necessary visas.  I’m pretty sure, without having any proof, that the Hungarian embassy was just taking advantage of the opportunity to cause a little grief for an American official.  This was the height of the Cold War era, after all. 

[In any case, the bureaucracy for which the communist countries were famous went into slow-motion action—or, rather, non-action.  I guess it’s no surprise that the Hungarian visa didn’t come through before we left Switzerland.  Mr. Brunst was instructed to pick it up at the Hungarian embassy in Moscow when we got there.  So when the departure time came, I boarded the train to Warsaw with my schoolmates and traveling companions.

[Let me make some comments on “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965,” which I’ll be running in six installments, before I start posting the transcription.  I’m going to stick with the names of cities and countries as they were when I made the trip.  Since the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, many have been changed; Czechoslovakia, for example, no longer even exists as a nation, having separated into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

[I will do my best in transliterating Russian names and words from the Cyrillic spelling.  Where it might be helpful, I’ll also provide the Russian spelling for those who can read it.  Anything that I add that wasn’t in my original journal, including comments or observations I didn’t make 57 years ago, I’ll indicate by enclosing in brackets.  That may include updated information that I couldn’t have known in 1965.

[I’ll correct spelling and grammar errors in my original, but I won’t edit myself.  Keep in mind, though, that I was just 18 when I wrote this journal and that the world was different, not just politically, but also socially, 57 years ago.

[Oh, one more thing.  I gave this journal a title, printed on the cover: “RUSSIAN TRIP” and, in Russian, “ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ В СССР” (“Puteshestviye v SSSR”, or “Journey in the USSR”). 

[(The initials СССР stand for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик  [Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik], the Russian name for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Though the letters look like the English initials ‘See See See Pee,’ in Russian they’re read: ‘Ess Ess Ess Air.’)]

DEPARTURE: GENEVA, SWISS CONFEDERATION
TRAIN JOURNEY: ZÜRICH – VIENNA – WARSAW

Friday, 9 April 1965 – 7:57 p.m. – Geneva. Switzerland

Finally we’re all packed and ready to go.  Today was absolutely hectic.  I discovered I have no Hungarian visa; it is in Moscow.  I made arrangements to fly to Bonn [Germany] from Vienna [at the end of the trip].

[When I left Geneva at the start of this journey, my father was still posted in Koblenz, Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany” on ROT, 9 and 12 March 2013), where he was first stationed with the U.S. Information Agency as Amerika Haus director in 1962.  He and my mother would move to the embassy in Bonn (capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany), where Dad would be the Cultural Attaché, while I was in the Soviet Union, so I would be going “home” to a new town after the trip.  The “arrangements” were to go directly from Vienna to Bonn instead of returning to Geneva first.]

We got the food and drink and further sustenance for the trip.

WARSAW, POLISH PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

Sunday, 11 April – 2:45 p.m. – Warsaw, Polish People’s Republic [now Republic of Poland]

We made [it] in one piece.  We arrived at the station [Gare Cornavin, Geneva] on Friday night [the 9th] and got to the train to Zürich.  Many were already “gay.”  [The word hadn’t taken on its current meaning relative to sexuality.  I was referring to our emotional states, possibly enhanced by alcoholic intake.]  Keats French [one of my Ecolint schoolmates who went on the trip with me; see “Going to a Swiss International School, Part 1,” 29 April 2021; he also gets several mentions in Part 5] even pulled a stiletto on the conductor.

[The trip from Geneva to Warsaw was by train—three trains, to be precise.  We left from Geneva’s Gare Cornavin at oh-dark-thirty (actually 1 a.m.) on Saturday, 10 April, for Warsaw, a 1,000-mile, 30-plus-hour journey.  We changed trains in Zürich (at 6:30 in the morning of the 10th) and again in Vienna (at 8:30 that evening) and then crossed the Iron Curtain (at about 11:30 p.m.) into communist-controlled Eastern Europe through Czechoslovakia (for which I needed a transit visa, that I’d gotten with no problem).]

In Zürich we changed trains [and stations, by motorcoach from Zürich Hauptbahnhof  (Main Railway Station) to Zürich-Enge] for Vienna.  We were in a mess.  Mark [Dyen, my roommate at Ecolint; his father was Dr. Isidore Dyen, professor of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale; see Parts 1 and 5 of “International School”] got a gift of a bag of rubbish from some English school girls—in his face.  He kindly returned it—in the window of their train.

When we got on the train, we had breakfast and went room hunting.  Our car (reserved) was not put on yet.  We were afraid of being uncoupled, but we made it.

We had a party in one of our compartments after dinner, before Vienna.

[The party was in Keats French’s compartment.  He’d brought along his portable electric guitar rig—the French boys (Keats’s older brother, Charley, didn’t go on the Russia trip) were from an Oklahoma cattle-and-oil family and very rich—and set it up in the train compartments.  We blasted rock ’n’ roll music out the windows at each station we stopped at along the route.]

In Vienna [another station-change: Vienna-West to Vienna-Sud], we got into our sleepers [wagons-lits] and prepared to “nap” [it was about 10 p.m.; we’d been on the go since Friday evening, about 26 hours total].  We were immediately awakened [about 1½ hours later] by Czech border guards and customs officials.  We dozed off until the Czech and Polish officials met us at the Polish border. 

Here the Poles looked at our declaration sheets, and, in signing mine, [one of the customs officials] picked up a Playboy as a rest.  He began to leaf through it.  When the second official came up, he dropped the magazine and said something in Polish.  The second man stared at the magazine on the floor for a short while.

[It should be remembered that in 1965, the height of the Cold War, crossing from free and democratic Austria into communist-Stalinist Czechoslovakia was more than just an ordinary border-crossing such as Switzerland-to-Austria or the German-Swiss transit I made often in those years.  The slightest infraction, even a perceived violation, could be—and sometimes was—blown into a full-fledged diplomatic incident.

[I’m reminded of an incident concerning a member of the U.S. embassy or consular staff that my dad knew or knew about.  She’d taken leave and made a trip to Eastern Europe.  At one stop, she wrote a postcard to a friend back in Germany saying, in what turned out to be an ill-advised joke, that she’d seen the light and was going to stay in the Workers’ Paradise.  She was pulled off a tour bus, detained, and questioned. 

[The authorities had obviously read her postcard and, as the commie officials had no sense of humor, especially about political matters, either decided to throw a scare into the woman just because they could or actually thought she might be up to something nefarious.  She was truly afraid that she might not get out of Eastern Europe—a feeling I later came to understand quite palpably myself.]

The morning was uneventful.  We are now going out for some exploring.

Monday, 12 April – 4:25 p.m. – Warsaw

Immediately after we stepped out of the hotel [Europejski in central Warsaw, with 260 rooms and 13 suites] we were approached for money-changing.  We were to discover this as not unusual.  We were even asked to come into a café for some wine as part of an inducement.

[Exchanging Western currency outside government-run exchange offices was illegal in communist Eastern Europe.  Holding Polish złoty (official exchange rate: $1 = zł 24; zł 1 = ca. 4¢) without receipts for their official exchange invited confiscation and more.]

We wandered around, into book stores and food stores.  On the way back past the hotel we bought some matzoh.  The storekeeper spoke only Polish, so we pointed and asked, “сколько?” [skolko ­– Russian for ‘how much?’].  She rattled off some Polish, and we asked her to write it.  She could not, so she took out some coins and showed us how much.  We paid and left.

We then went looking for the shopping center and explored a department store.  We tried to find a short-cut back by asking some Poles, who told us to follow them, but ended up showing us the same way we came.

Breakfast this morning was not good (all the other meals were [good]).  The eggs we[re] half-cooked.

On the sight-seeing, we saw a film on Warsaw’s war history [World War II, I suspect; it was only 20-26 years earlier], then we visited a kindergarten, the stadium, the cathedral, a modern church, the ghetto monument, the cultural center, a Supersam supermarket.

[Of the sights I listed above, I have no idea what the kindergarten was.  The stadium was the Stadion Dziesięciolecia (English: 10th-Anniversary Stadium), opened in 1955 with a seating capacity of 100,000; in the 1980s, it had deteriorated beyond affordable repair and was largely abandoned as a sports center.  It was demolished in 2008 and replaced by the National Stadium in 2012.

[The Warsaw Roman Catholic cathedral—Poles are 87.6% Catholic—is St. John’s Archcathedral in the Old Town.  The mother church of the archdiocese of Warsaw, it was originally built in 1390, but rebuilt several times.  It was heavily damaged during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in World War II, but was rebuilt after the war.  The ghetto monument is the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, unveiled in 1948.   

[The cultural center is the Palace of Culture and Science, built in 1955.  It’s a Soviet era high-rise building  built in the Stalinist style and houses various public and cultural institutions such as cinemas, theaters, libraries, sports clubs, university faculties, and authorities of the Polish Academy of Sciences. 

[Supersam was a modernist supermarket built in 1962.   It was demolished in 2006 despite a campaign to save the building as an architectural monument.   I can’t positively identify the “modern church,” but it could be St. Joseph the Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, construction of which was started in 1939 but interrupted when the war began in Poland that September.  It was restarted in 1945 and completed in 1961.]

After lunch we went souvenir shopping and I bought some tickets to David and Lisa for tonight.

[David and Lisa is a 1962 American independent film based on the novella Lisa and David by Theodore Isaac Rubin.  It was directed by Frank Perry from a screenplay by his wife, Eleanor Perry, telling the story of a young man (Keir Dullea) who believes that being touched can kill him.  He’s brought to a residential treatment center, where he meets Lisa (Janet Margolin), a young woman who has a split personality.  Frank Perry earned a 1963 Academy Award nomination for Best Director and Eleanor Perry was nominated for her screenplay.

[I don’t remember what prompted me to see a three-year-old American movie in Warsaw—though I’m pretty sure I hadn’t seen it in the States before I moved to Germany in 1963.  Poland, of course, had a good film industry of its own (Andrzej Wajda, 1926-2016; Roman Polanski, b. 1933) and later we saw an experimental Polish film as well.]

After dinner, for which we were late, I tried to round up the people for D&L.  We couldn’t find two, but they all got there.

The picture was very good.

[In order to keep date entries together, I’m breaking Part 1 of “Travel Journal: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1965” here.  Part 2 will be published on Rick On Theater on Thursday, 26 May, and the following four installments will appear every three days thereafter.

[Please come back to ROT for the rest of my transcribed 57-year-old chronicle of my visit to Warsaw and the Soviet Union, a trip that was very significant to this impressionable young man.  Revisiting this experience has been very moving for me; it remains to be seen of it has any repercussions for ROTters.  (I’d be interested to hear.)

[The second installment of this 1965 travel journal—I have posted two other journals of long-ago travels: “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980” (five parts; 24 December 2021-5 January 2022) and “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982” (12 parts; 11-23 July and 2 -20 August 2021)—will pick up on 15 April 1965 with my final day in Warsaw and my arrival in Moscow in the Soviet Union, the trip’s first stop in that vast country.

[In addition to some of the major sights of the Soviet capital—Red Square, Lenin’s Tomb, the Kremlin, GUM—we saw a ballet performance and the world-renowned Moscow Circus.]

Playing (With) The Palace

 

On 31 January 2020, I posted “Moving the Empire,” a report on the 1998 relocation of the Empire Theatre on 42nd Street from halfway down the block from 7th Avenue to the 8th Avenue end.  Engineers actually lifted the theater, opened in 1912, a few inches, set it on wheels, moved it out into the roadway, and rolled it westward to make it the façade and lobby of the AMC cineplex.

Well, someone’s done it again.  This time it was the Palace Theatre on Times Square, one of Broadway’s oldest, and it was raised up 30 feet to make room for commercial space at street level beneath the extant theater as part of the TSX Broadway project. 

The Palace Theatre, at 1564 Broadway (at W. 47th Street just east across 7th Avenue from Father Duffy Square, the northern end of Times Square, and the TKTS discount-ticket booth), is the famed vaudeville house featured in the ubiquitous phrase, “playing the Palace.”  (A punning allusion even made it into the lyrics of “Very Soft Shoes” from Broadway’s Once Upon a Mattress, 1959, which is set in 1428: “In the days when my dear father played the palace / Back in 1392.”) 

Opened in 1913, the legendary house hosted major headliners until 1932, when it converted to movies.  In 1936, the producers at the 1743-seat Palace began presenting live shows with the films, an attempt to revive vaudeville that lasted until 1957.  The shows, headlined by star artists like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, were successes, but vaudeville was beyond resuscitation and the Palace reverted to movies‑only again. 

The Nederlander Organization, second-largest owners of Broadway houses, bought the theater in 1965 and it opened the following year as a legitimate theater, still showing movies between bookings.  From 1987 to 1991, a 45-story hotel, the DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel, was built above the Palace.  The hotel building and dozens of billboards obscured all of the historic theater’s façade except the marquee. 

The theater closed again for major renovations in September 2018 for TSX Broadway, and wasn’t expected to reopen until 2021.  The last show to play the Palace was SpongeBob SquarePants, the musical based on Nickelodeon’s animated children’s cable-TV series, which opened on 4 December 2017 and closed on 16 September 2018 to accommodate the project.

(I think the first show I saw at the Palace was Sweet Charity (1966-67), with Gwen Verdon, the theater’s first production as a legit playhouse.  After a long break, mostly due to army service, I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s London Assurance there in January 1975 with Donald Sinden, one of a short list of great individual performances I saw.  Woman of the Year with Lauren Bacall and Harry Guardino and the wonderful Marilyn Cooper came in July of ’81.

(I didn’t get to Broadway much for a while, so my next visit to the Palace was in July 2015 when I saw the stage adaptation of the 1951 movie musical An American in Paris, reported on ROT on 2 August 2015.  The last production I saw at the famous theater was the revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s movical Sunset Boulevard with Glenn Close reprising her role as silent-movie star Norma Desmond in April 2017, the Palace’s second-to-last show before the construction shut-down (see my report on 8 May 2017.)

The renovation work was delayed due to precautions to protect a neighboring building from potential damage.  The project won’t be completed now until early 2023, but it reached a milestone that culminated the first week of this month with the Great Hoist.

Talk of TSX Broadway started showing up in the media coverage in the worlds of entertainment, business, real estate, architecture, and hotels in 2018.  The development is so named because of the building’s location on Times Square, the “Crossroads of the World”; as far as I’ve been able to determine, neither the enterprise nor any of the partners are associated with another TSX, the Toronto Stock Exchange.

In the view of Mancini Duffy, one of the two architectural firms that designed TSX Broadway (the other is Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, known in the business as PBDW):

Located at the busiest corner of the most heavily trafficked public space in the world, the building at 1568 Broadway is currently being transformed into an unprecedented, entertainment-driven project set to reimagine how people engage Times Square.

The project was approved by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2015 despite preservationists’ concerns (the theater’s interior, by Milwaukee architects Kirchoff & Rose, was landmarked in 1987).  This was followed by the Nederlander Organization and Maefield Development, one of the developing partners, announcing the latest renovation.  Then architect’s renderings were released in 2017.  

The New York City Council approved the plan in June 2018, and L&L Holding Company, Maefield, and Fortress Investment Group, the developers of TSX Broadway along with Nederlander, revealed the plans for the project.  In March 2019, the builders of TSX Broadway broke ground, and on 7 January 2022, the Palace Theatre began its ascent.  The entire reconstruction project was budgeted at $2.5 billion.  

The 43-story, 460-suite DoubleTree Hotel that had replaced the original Palace Theatre exterior was to be demolished and itself replaced with a 669-room hotel, reusing the existing tower.  The new hotel’s operator has not been selected.

Some of the rooms will look out on Duffy Square’s iconic Red Steps at the rear of the TKTS booth and others will overlook the site of the famous New Year’s Eve Ball Drop.  The developers anticipate that for that event, some suites would go for as much as $15,000 a night.

The theater was raised 30 feet above grade, with excavation below ground-level to accommodate approximately 75,000 square feet of retail space beneath the theater.  The same structural team that moved the Empire Theater in 1998 has overseen the Palace Theatre’s move.

Ten floors of retail space will be built around the theater and the hotel will be built above the retail floors.  To anchor the development, L&L Holding is pitching a casino, the city’s first, according to Infobae, a news website out of Buenos Aires.  L&L hasn’t formally proposed the casino to New York State officials, but the state can issue three new casino licenses beginning next year.  Nonetheless, a proposal for a casino in the heart of Manhattan would likely experience considerable political opposition.

In addition to the 75,000 square feet of additional retail space, the building will have 30,000 square feet of dining and drinking space.  Part of that will be the largest outdoor terrace in Times Square at 10,000 square feet.

The 46-story, 550-foot, mixed-use building’s design also includes a 4,000-square-foot stage that hangs 30 feet above Times Square.  TSX Broadway would the first building in the Theatre District to feature a permanent outdoor stage and concert arena, perfect for New Year’s Eve events.  The stage will have broadcast and streaming capabilities “for performances, global product launches, and memorable events,” says Mancini Duffy.

Behind this will be a 9-story main screen that’ll wrap around the skyscraper at the southeast corner of 7th Avenue and 47th Street, giving the impression that the entertainers are performing from inside the video wall.  At 22,350 square feet of LED canvas and 28 million pixels, TSX Broadway will have the highest-resolution display system in Times Square, as well as the largest commercial screen in the area.

On 4 May, the developers announced the completion of the Great Hoist of the Palace Theatre.  The engineering feat was overseen by Urban Foundation and Engineering and used a system of 34 hydraulic jacks to hoist the 14-million-pound theater at a speed of about a quarter of an inch per hour over four months.

The whole theater building was disconnected from its foundation and placed upon a platform for the lift.  When the theater rose to what would be about the building’s third floor, it was secured with what are known as “super-columns” and poured-concrete slabs to connect the old building to the new structure.

During the lift, Urban Foundation installed a cushion of a 5-foot-thick layer of concrete on the bottom of the theater enclosure.  The original columns supporting the theater’s auditorium were replaced and after the theater had been raised 17 feet, the lifting process was temporarily paused while a structural frame was installed around the edges of the theater.

Now work will commence on restoring the landmarked interior of the historic theater, all that’s left of the original Palace.  This will be the job of PBDW and will cost $50 million. 

The Palace’s 1913 Beaux-Arts interiors, including historic paintings, plaster balcony fasciae, gold-leaf gilding, ornate plasterwork, the sumptuous dome, and chandeliers, will be restored “to the glory it originally had,” asserts David Orowitz, managing director at L&L Holding.

The renovated Palace will have a new entrance on West 47th Street, around the corner from its former entrance on 7th Avenue, with a new, 80-foot-long marquee.  The new interior will have a larger lobby, twice as many bathrooms, additional space in the wings, new and larger dressing rooms, a larger green room (a space in a theater that serves as a waiting area and lounge for performers before, during, and after a show when they’re not engaged on stage), wider staircases, elevators, and a building completely accessible to theater goers of various abilities.

The new entrance will lead theatergoers to a pair of large escalators that’ll take them to the new structure’s third floor, where they’ll find the new lobby.  “We’re going to have architecture that takes into consideration what the theater box looks like,” explains Orowitz, “and introduces a modern interpretation of that.”

Altogether, TSX Broadway will have 550,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space.  In all the publicity and press coverage of the enterprise, the retail spaces are labeled “immersive,” “experiential,” or “lifestyle.”  These are terms (and a marketing concept) aimed at millennial consumers, so they’re new to me.  (I’m a “semicentennial” because I was born in the middle of the last century.)

In Real Estate Forum, Betsy Kim defines “experiential hotel”:

There has been a trend among hotels—indeed among almost all real estate asset classes—in recent years to move away from commoditization and to providing experiences.  This has resulted in the flourishing of hotels in niche markets such as Queens and Brooklyn, which now have become destinations unto themselves.

On UWIRE, Estelle Saad explains, “Experiential retail refers to purchasing an experience, such as air travel, rather than a good or service.”  With reference specifically to TSX Broadway, the New York Times says, “The project is part of a trend of offering experiences, like meditation sessions and salt rooms, to lure shoppers to stores.” 

In the Times, C. J. Hughes, a freelance real estate writer whose work appears in many papers, explains the strategy:

TSX is trying to sign a lease in a punishing climate for brick-and-mortar stores that has led to vacancies across New York, even in busy Times Square.  But the development team behind the project, led by the real estate developer L&L Holding, is betting that if a store offers enough fun and games, it can beat back the encroachment of online retailers.

Though experiential retail can be a “risky endeavor” because of “hefty upfront costs,” says Hughes, and “L&L is taking a gamble on TSX Broadway,” L&L executives, reports the Times writer, say that “the extra oomph that TSX will deliver will be irresistible to passers-by.”  The reason, adds Hughes, is that “online retail can’t duplicate it.”

Without revealing TSX Broadway’s rents, the speculation is that it will be significantly higher than average (for the “the latest bells and whistles”) for Times Square, which run around $2,000 per square foot.  

According to Crain’s New York Business, “Amazon, Disney, Facebook, YouTube, Samsung, Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba, and even Walmart have expressed interest in the site.”

[In August 2020, I posted a four-part post on theater superstitions and ghosts.  In the fourth installment, I wrote about the ghosts inhabiting the Palace Theatre (see “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 4,” 23 August 2020).  Reputedly the Palace is the most haunted Broadway house.  One count is that there are over 100 ghosts haunting the Palace. 

[The Palace Theatre is reputed to be home to more ghosts than any other Broadway house.  “Among them,” lists Playbill, “is a mysterious figure who passes open doorways late at night, a child ghost who plays peekaboo in the mezzanine, a musician dressed in white who appears in the orchestra pit and a tight-rope walker (presumably from the theatre’s vaudeville days) whose appearance is said to foretell the viewer’s death.”

[Judy Garland’s spirit is said still to haunt the great, old theater (which has mounted exhibits in its lobbies of Garland memorabilia and old photographs), especially on the “the Judy Garland Staircase.”  Garland would post herself on this hidden staircase at the house-left rear of the orchestra and smoke a cigarette or two before entering the stage.

[The tight-rope walker is said to be Louis Borsalino (or Bossalina) who fell to his death during a performance when he was working without a safety net.  According to the New York Post, “Stagehands say that when the theater is empty, the ghost of [the vaudeville acrobat] can be seen swinging from the rafters.  He lets out a blood-curdling scream, then re-enacts his nose dive.”  Other sources have seen him walking a tight-rope from the house-left box up to the mezzanine.  Either way, as a harbinger of death, this is not a ghost you should want to meet.

[The New York Times of 28 August 1935, reported the accident involving the 31-year-old Borsalino; however, and the report listed him as “in a serious condition” with “a fracture of the pelvis, possible internal injuries and lacerations of the left arm.”  The acrobat survived, though, and after a lifetime of performing, Borsalino died in 1963 in Pennsylvania.

[Old ghosts seem not to stick around new structures that replace old theaters.  In some cases, though, spirits linger in playhouses built on sites of older buildings. 

[The Palace’s spooks have apparently been quiescent in recent years.  Reports of apparitions and inexplicable happenings have been few lately—though some of that may be attributable to the theater having closed in September 2018 for the TSX Broadway project and isn’t expected to reopen until 2023.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens after the “new” Palace Theatre opens next year.]