Recalling When New York City’s Theater District was Downtown
Centuries ago, in an era when the district now known as Midtown still consisted of farms and forests, New York had a thriving theater district in Lower Manhattan, clustered around Nassau and John Streets.
The first professional theater in the British colony of New York opened in 1732. Aptly named the “New Theatre,” it was located on Maiden Lane, between Nassau and John Streets, and had room for up to 400 guests. For decades, it did a thriving business presenting Shakespeare plays and light musical fare such as “The Beggar’s Opera.” But by the mid-1760s, the space had become more valuable as commercial real estate, which led to it being demolished and redeveloped.
About the same time, the John Street Theatre opened around the corner, with space for an audience of more than 700 people. Hastily renamed the Theatre Royal during the American Revolution (when British troops occupied New York), and then re-rechristened for its address once the war was decided, it was the home of the Old American Company theater troupe, at a time when America itself was not very old. President George Washington regularly attended. (The image above of the Old American Company playbill dates from 1794.)
For five days in April 1796, the John Street Theatre hosted “The Archers,” which some historians believe to have been the first musical written for an American stage. The New York Times was not yet around to pan the show, but one reason for its brief tenure might be discerned in these less than Sondheim-esque lyrics: “Forever lives the patriot’s fame / Forever useful is his name / Inspiring virtuous deeds / How glorious ’tis in spite of time / In spite of death, to live sublime / While age to age succeeds.”
In 1798, the John Street Theatre met the same fate as its Nassau Street predecessor, and was redeveloped. That year, however, the much grander Park Theatre opened on Chatham Street, which is now Park Row. It offered space for more than 1,000 attendees, each whom paid between 35 and 75 cents for tickets.
As theater historian Dr. Christopher Swift, a professor at the City University of New York, notes in “The City Performs: An Architectural History of New York City Theaters,” the Park Theatre was inspired by European theater architecture. “However, due to insufficient human and material resources, the theatre lacked some of the typical refinements of its European prototype. Since marble quarries were not yet excavated in the Americas, the double stage columns were painted white to resemble marble, and the flat ceiling was painted to look like a dome.”
After a fire in 1820, the Park Theater was rebuilt to accommodate an audience of as many as 2,500, and five years later hosted the first U.S. performance of an Italian opera: Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” The facility closed permanently in 1840, when the Astor family decided the land was more value as retail space. But in its heyday, the venue was so popular that the City created an entirely new street behind it, Theatre Alley, to handle the overflow of horse-drawn carriage traffic created by well-heeled audience members. Remembered as the first one-way street in New York, Theatre Alley remains in Lower Manhattan to this day, a forlorn palimpsest that stretches for one block, ending at Ann and Beekman Streets, while running parallel to (and between) Park Row and Nassau Street.
Just as the Park Theatre was approaching its final curtain, the City acquired from the federal government a former military fortification and immigration center in what is now Battery Park. In 1845, what had been known as Fort Clinton became Castle Garden, a theater and concert hall with room for 6,000 spectators. In 1850, renowned European soprano Jenny Lind gave her debut U.S. performances there. Demand for seats was so great that impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum (who had promised Lind $1,000 per night) sold tickets by auction, rather than at a fixed price. (Barnum, being Barnum, also charged admission to the auction.) According to a contemporary account in the New York Sun, the first round of bidding was won by John Genin, “the leading hatter of the city,” who paid $225 per ticket. (Adjusted for inflation, that comes to $10,000 today.) Even though most patrons paid much less (averaging around 50 cents), Barnum grossed more than $14,000 per night for the length of Lind’s engagement, or more than half a million dollars for each show, when adjusted for inflation.
By the 1850s, however, Lower Manhattan’s theatrical star was already entering eclipse. By the time of the Civil War, more (and larger) theaters had opened in the vicinity of Union Square, and as the dawn of the 20th century approached, even that new theater district was upstaged by a cluster of showplaces in the vicinity of Broadway and 42nd Street.
Today, the Downtown theater scene is undergoing a new renaissance, thanks to the recent debut of the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, the newly founded Sands College of the Performing Arts at Pace University, and the relocation of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting to Lower Manhattan, along with vibrant local theater groups, such as The Flea and Soho Rep.
Still, there is a wistful quality to the vanished epicenter of theater that once was here. Its epitaph may have been written by legendary Broadway lyricist Johnny Mercer, in a song he penned for the musical “42nd Street:”
“The joy that you find here, you borrow
You cannot keep it long it seems
Still sing a song and dance along
The boulevard of broken dreams…”