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.]