“They’re Tearing Down the Hippodrome”: A History of the Theater’s Demolition
By Sunny Stalter-Pace
When the Hippodrome opened on April 12, 1905, New York City was in a state of transition. Many of the Midtown landmarks known today were under construction: the cornerstone for the New York Public Library (two blocks south of the Hippodrome) was laid, but the building would not open until 1911; Grand Central Station (three blocks east) still welcomed trains on the New York Central line. It had been reimagined but not yet rebuilt as the iconic marble edifice with cerulean blue and gold leaf ceilings. At this moment of rebirth, the Hippodrome sat at the center of the New York to come. The 5200-seat theater stood on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Street, where for thirty-four years it housed extravagant spectacles, vaudeville, opera, sporting events, and rallies. Due to rising land values and cultural forces redefining the identity of Midtown Manhattan, the Hippodrome was finally razed beginning in August 1939.
Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Theatres -- U.S. -- N.Y. -- Hippodrome" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1840 - 2020. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-5409-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
It had been threatened before: as Jane Corby noted in the Brooklyn Eagle, “ever since 1923 rumors of the demolition of the gigantic showhouse have been recurrent at brief intervals.” [1] The show presented in the 1922-1923 season, called Better Times, featured some of the Hippodrome’s most popular performers and theatrical effects. Marceline the clown led a troupe of fun-makers (including a young Cary Grant); Powers’ Elephants shimmied; and rows of chorus girls dubbed “water guards” marched down into the stage’s built-in water tank and disappeared. The real estate company that owned the Hippodrome at that time made an announcement: after the season ended, the building would be sold and a hotel built on the lot. [2] Producers and performers alike prepared for the end. Artistic director R.H. Burnside invited VIPs to what he called the “18th and Farewell Anniversary of the Hippodrome.” One guest sent affectionate regrets, telling Burnside, “Kindly kiss all the elephants good-bye, and in case you do not want to No. 12 Horse and the Baby Elephant, send them up to me.” [3]
Despite the goodbyes, the hotel plan fell through. Vaudeville producer E.F. Albee finally leased the Hippodrome that summer. [4] He made extensive renovations, tearing out the stage apron with the water tank beneath and adding additional orchestra seating. [5] Albee spent a million dollars converting it into a showpiece theater in the Keith vaudeville circuit. [6] The Keith-Albee organization bought the building and land in April 1925. [7] First they put on vaudeville shows, and then a combination bill of vaudeville and film. The owners struggled to turn a profit, though. The theater was huge, now with 6,100 seats to fill — and it faced stiff competition from Keith-Albee’s own Palace Theatre and a new crop of opulent movie palaces being built nearby throughout the 1920s. [8]
Real estate developer Fred F. French, who had recently built the east side apartment complex Tudor City [9], purchased the Hippodrome in December 1929. French hoped to construct an 83-story skyscraper in the theater’s place. [10] French mortgaged the property to obtain funds to build this development and continued to lease the property to RKO. After the Wall Street crash that fall, the market had briefly rallied; Finch’s plan appeared on the New York Times front page. Announcements for developing the parcel of land, however, continued to be aspirational rather than descriptive — much like theatrical reports from Hippodrome press agents. This purchase led critic and Algonquin Round Tabler Heywood Broun to write a nostalgic reminiscence that began: “When they tear the Hippodrome down and start a skyscraper in its place I trust the builders will look about carefully to ascertain whether any elephants have been left on the premises. It might be well, also, to make a search in order to be sure that all the girls who used to disappear into the tank have by now come up again.” [11] Broun mourns the Hippodrome shows that have already disappeared in this era and notes that if he has to walk in the offices at night he will “a bag of psychic peanuts” for the elephant ghosts haunting the venue. [12] Even though the Hippodrome continued to operate as a theater on and off for another decade, Broun set the tone for the waves of nostalgia that would come once the Hippodrome was finally demolished.
The Hippodrome passed through the hands of several more showmen, each drawing on the building’s storied past as a site for dazzling spectacle. In August 1932 the RKO lease expired, the bank foreclosed, and Fred French lost ownership of the property. [13] The building was leased by exhibitors from the Midwest who planned to put on discount film and vaudeville programs. [14] They were convinced by impresario Alfredo Salmaggi to produce grand opera at popular prices. [15] Starting with Aida, Salmaggi’s company produced the “surprise hit of the summer.” [16] Opera was a regular feature at the Hippodrome until it closed, providing an inexpensive dose of highbrow culture during the Great Depression. Billy Rose renovated the theater once again for his musical extravaganza Jumbo, which the marquee promised to be “Bigger Than a Show, Better Than a Circus!” [17] The circus musical, with Rodgers and Hart tunes and Jimmy Durante as the star, ran for sixth months before touring. Finally, Twentieth Century Sporting Club promoter Mike Jacobs took over from Rose. [18] Jacobs put on boxing and wrestling matches; in 1938, he worked with Lee Shubert to introduce jai alai to New York City. Even this athletic vision of the Hippodrome had roots in its earlier incarnations: Sporting Days (1908) began with the last at-bat of a college baseball game performed by a full team, with then-current New York Giants captain John H. McGraw playing their coach. [19] Jacobs retained an office in the Hippodrome through the middle of 1939: a New Yorker profile reports that he also annexed a “hideaway” in the “ladies’ powder room” where he could escape from the crowds. [20]
Referee watching wrestlers in the Hippodrome, 6th Ave. and 43rd Street, ca. 1938. Photographer unknown, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.
At the end of June 1939, City Bank Farmer’s Trust Company gave notice to their tenants on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th: their leases would not be renewed, and they had to vacate before September 1. [21] After many false alarms, the Hippodrome building was finally going to be demolished. Jacobs left earlier since he was in the belly of the theater and not just a storefront. By mid-July, he moved his organization to the Brill Building. [22] The bank planned to build “a modest group of ‘taxpayer’ stores,” that is low-rise stores with high profit margins that could cover the taxes for the property until a more suitable option for development was found. [23] A parking garage was also mentioned, and indeed the Hippodrome site continues to host a parking garage even today.
Upon hearing the announcement, H.I. Phillips, columnist for the New York Sun, wrote a seven-stanza poem memorializing the theater. [24] Phillips celebrated its “wholesome pageantry” in verse: he named some of the most memorable acts and contrasted their family-friendly quality with that of current entertainment on Broadway, which Phillips found “both lewd and raw.” [25] While it’s likely that he was referencing Tobacco Road, the hicksploitation mega-hit still running at the Forrest Theatre at that time, Phillips also highlights a broader cultural shift. As theater historian Brooks McNamara notes, Times Square at the end of the 1930s, “was no longer primarily a legitimate theater district; it had evolved into a much more broadly based entertainment center and, in the process, into a far less genteel area.” [26] During the Depression, several theaters converted to burlesque houses. [27] Even after Fiorello La Guardia shut them down in the late 1930s, Times Square recreation was decidedly tawdry, with theaters outnumbered by penny arcades, shooting galleries, and fortune tellers. [28] When Thompson and Dundy decided on the location for the Hippodrome in 1904, they stayed away from the immediate area Times Square because it was too expensive. They envisioned a middle-class alternative in Midtown for the kinds of people who came to Luna Park, their amusement park on Coney Island. [29] By the 1930s, a rougher version of Coney Island had returned to Times Square, and the Hippodrome seemed like an innocent alternative.
Though Times Square seemed doomed to decline, Sixth Avenue was full of potential. Much of the optimism around new development arose in tandem with the demolition of its elevated train. A New York Times magazine essay from March 1939 calls Sixth Avenue “the Cinderella of Gotham, the unlovely sister of the bright and thriving streets beside it.” [30] Once the El is fully taken down, the story suggests, the street will be ready to take its place at the ball. The Hippodrome was built in the twentieth century, but it was a Progressive era creation, one that drew on and combined many nineteenth-century performance forms. It is unsurprising that they were both dismissed and mourned as part of New York City’s past when taken down. [31]
On August 14, 1939, the process finally began. A salvaging company removed hardware and architectural elements from the building’s interior. [32] (Mike Jacobs reportedly had already made off with the marble fireplace from the ladies’ room.) [33] The exterior demolition started two days later. Because the event had been promised so many times in the past, notes Jane Corby in the Brooklyn Eagle, “there are plenty of people who will refuse to believe that it is actually on the way down until they see the bricks parading down the wreckers’ chute.” [34] They finally did.
[New York Hippodrome, circa 1905], August 16, 1939, Brooklyn Daily Eagle; Local Newspapers on Microfilm collection, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
The reality of the demolition opened the floodgates of nostalgic remembrance. Gawkers reminisced on the wooden walkways surrounding the site. [35] The “Talk of the Town” essay reviewing the events of 1939 in the New Yorker recalls “the shock and the sense of personal loss” when the author first walked past “the level field of brick and rubble, the raw gap in the jawline of Manhattan, where the Hippodrome had always been.” [36] R.H. Burnside, the longtime artistic director of the Hippodrome whose connection with the theater had ended in 1923, appeared on a radio program called “Horse and Buggy Days” to discuss the theater’s history. Burnside bantered with the host and the music director, who both claimed to know him from the Lamb’s Club. [37] Burnside wrote a response to the Phillips column from July, which he read. The poem joked about the theater’s recent difficulties: “They’re tearing down the Hippodrome, alas, we can’t prevent it” rhymes with “They found out in these modern days, they couldn’t even rent it.” [38] But the poem ends affectionately — “It was a grand old place” — as does the program.
These histories of the Hippodrome offer New Yorkers the opportunity to work through their ambivalence, and indeed their grief, about the waves of new construction and the changing face of their city. [39] “It is easy to feel sad about the Hippodrome,” writes Jane Cobb: “The sight of burly men in their undershirts, hammering away with large uncompromising mallets is always likely to bring a where-is-the-glory-that-was-Greece depression. And the Hippodrome — like all buildings of its period — looked as though its architect expected it to last.” [40] Narrators in these stories long for a form of historic preservation that provides some sense of continuity, a longing that they see repeatedly being rejected by the forces of urban development. In his “New York Day by Day” column, Charles Driscoll watches the same burly men because he wants to see what they do with the carved elephant’s-head keystone over the building’s entrance. [41] The foreman of the wrecking crew saves the elephant’s head for two days because someone has expressed interest in it, but when that man fails to return the foreman throws the sculpture “in an unhonored grave” of construction site rubble. [42] Driscoll ends his column by imagining archaeologists in the far future who unearth the carving and celebrate the culture that produced it.
Discourse about the Hippodrome follows the pattern observed by Max Page, where real estate development shapes not only the city’s landscape but its “written and displayed history” as well. [43] Hippodrome memorials took place in ephemeral media: newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts. As they marked the loss of the built environment, these memorials tried to preserve some of the utopian impulses associated with it. In this way, they accomplish some of the same work done by literary journalists such as Joseph Mitchell — and by more contemporary New York elegists including Lucy Sante and Jeremiah Moss. [44] On the Town, produced five years after the theater’s demolition, treated the theater’s name as a punchline, another one of the anachronistic references in sailor Chip’s out-of-date tourist guide. The Hippodrome belonged to an earlier era of New York City. But through the tributes to that era and that theater, we can become more attuned to the layers of history that echo through present-day buildings like the trumpeting of elephant ghosts.
Sunny Stalter-Pace is the Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University and Chair for Interdisciplinary Approaches of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (Northwestern, 2020) and Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (University of Massachusetts, 2013). She is currently writing a cultural history of the New York Hippodrome. Other pieces she has written on the Hippodrome may be found at at the New York Public Library site, NY1920s, and her research blog.
[1] Jane Corby. “‘The Hip’ Comes Down! Bricks to Start Tumbling Today, but There’ll Be Some Folks Who Won’t Believe It.” Brooklyn Eagle, 16 Aug. 1939, p. 13.
[2] “Plans Big Hotel on Hippodrome Site: Syndicate Pushes Deal to Replace Theatre With a $15,000,000 Structure.” New York Times, 22 Feb. 1923, p. 3.
[3] Mr. Frank P. Furlong, letter to R.H. Burnside, April 10, 1923. Series I, Box 11, R.H. Burnside Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
[4] “New York Hippodrome Has Passed to Keith Circuit.” Variety, vol. LXXI, no. 9, 19 July 1923, p. 1.
[5] Milton Epstein. The New York Hippodrome: Spectacle on Sixth Avenue from “A Yankee Circus on Mars” to “Better Times”, a Complete Chronology of Performances, 1905-1939. (Volumes I and II). PhD Dissertation, New York University, Department of Performance Studies. 600
[6] Arthur Wertheim. Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 256-257
[7] Albee Pays Over $5,000,000 for Hippodrome; Will Continue It as a Keith Playhouse. New York Times 23 Apr. 1925, p. 1.
[8] Lynne B Sagalyn. Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change. MIT Press, 2023. 67.
[9] “Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave.” The Gotham Center for New York City History, 24 Oct. 2019. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/tudor-city-manhattans-residential-enclave.
[10] “6th Ave. Tower Plan Finally Abandoned; Hippodrome, Held by Fred F. French Interests, Is Now Controlled by Farmers Trust Co. The New York Times, 23 Aug. 1932. 37.
“Hippodrome to Go; 83-Story Building to Rise on Its Site.” New York Times, 16 Dec. 1929, 1.
[11] Heywood Broun. “It Seems to Me.” Buffalo Times (Orig New York Telegram), 19 Dec. 1929, p. 6.
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Finale for Hipp in N.Y.” Variety, vol. 107, no. 13, 6 Sept. 1932, p. 1.
[14] “Inside Stuff -- Pictures.” Variety, 13 Dec. 1932, p. 40.
[15] Bishop, Cardell. Opera at the Hippodrome in New York City, 1933-1939: Grand Opera for a .25 Admission. First edition, Cardell Bishop, 1979.
[16] “Heard in Crosstown.” The New York State Exhibitor, 25 July 1933, p. 7.
[17] Daniel Rockfern. Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway. New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. 209.
[18] Fred Van Ness. “Jacobs Takes Over Hippodrome.” New York Times. 29 May 1936, p. 24.
[19] “Manhattan Stage Notes.” Brooklyn Citizen, 26 Aug. 1908, p. 5.
[20] Alva Johnston. “Profiles: Vaudeville to Television -- II.” New Yorker, 5 Oct. 1946, pp. 36–47. 40.
[21] “Famed Hippodrome to Be Demolished: City Landmark to Be Torn Down.” New York Times, 1 July 1939, p. 19.
[22] “Jacobs’ Plans Still Intact.” New York Post, 1 Feb. 1939, p. 16.
[23] “Famed Hippodrome to Be Demolished: City Landmark to Be Torn Down.” New York Times, 1 July 1939, p. 19. For a definition of “taxpayer” buildings and a description of their architectural styles, see Christopher Gray. “Streetscapes/Manhattan; From Deep in the Depression, Three Low-Rise Corners.” The New York Times, 29 Aug. 2004. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/realestate/streetscapes-manhattan-from-deep-in-the-depression-three-low-rise-corners.html.
[24] H. I. Phillips, “The Sun Dial.” The Sun, 14 July 1939.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Brooks McNamara. “The Entertainment District at the End of the 1930s.” Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, edited by William R. Taylor, JHU Press, 1996, pp. 178–90. 179
[27] Lynne B Sagalyn. Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change. MIT Press, 2023. 73.
[28] “La Guardia Backs Ban on Burlesque,” The New York Times, 3 May 1937. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/1937/05/03/archives/la-guardia-backs-ban-on-burlesque-pledges-fight-to-finish-to.html.
[29] “Thompson and Dundy’s Proposed Hippodrome.” New-York Tribune, 3 July 1904, p. 10.
[30] Ernest La France. “Rebirth of an Avenue.” New York Times, 19 Mar. 1939, p. 113.
[31] See Sunny Stalter. “Farewell to the El: Nostalgic Urban Visuality on the Third Avenue Elevated Train.” American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2006, pp. 869–90..
[32] “HIPPODROME NEARS END: Demolition of Famous 6th Ave. Building Starts Tomorrow.” New York Times, 15 Aug. 1939, p. 40.
[33] Alva Johnston. “Profiles: Vaudeville to Television -- II.” New Yorker, 5 Oct. 1946, pp. 36–47. 40.
[34] Jane Corby. “‘The Hip’ Comes Down! Bricks to Start Tumbling Today, but There’ll Be Some Folks Who Won’t Believe It.” Brooklyn Eagle, 16 Aug. 1939, p. 13.
[35] Jane Cobb. “Living and Leisure.” New York Timess, 17 Sept. 1939, p. 61.
[36] “Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment.” New Yorker, 30 Dec. 1939, p. 9.
[37] Interview with Burnside. 13 Sept. 1939. R.H. Burnside collection, *T-Mss 1952-002. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts., Box 1, folder 7.
[38] Ibid.
[39] For a discussion of the different responses to these forces of development, see Max Page. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
[40] Jane Cobb, “Living and Leisure.” New York Times, 17 Sept. 1939, p. 61.
[41] Charles Driscoll. “New York Day By Day.” The Indianapolis Star, 9 Nov. 1939, p. 10.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Max Page. The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
[44] For a discussion of Mitchell, see Tamar Katz, “Anecdotal History: The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, and Literary Journalism.” American Literary History, vol. 27, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 461–86. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv031.