100 Years at 95th and Broadway!
This fall we celebrate an important anniversary with our beloved building on 95th and Broadway turning 100! This has given me a great excuse to delve into the history of this place, and over the last couple of months, I have been looking at old newspaper articles, archival materials, and more, and have come up with some fascinating facts and photos. So, in this first post, I wanted to share with you some of my findings that are particularly exciting:
Here’s the building when it first opened as the Astor Market in October 1915. Not only did the building have soaring windows but there was a 290-foot-long frieze by William Mackay showing farmers bringing their goods to market. Unfortunately no detailed images of the frieze survive, although you can see a little bit under the cornice of the building in this photo. (Mackay is perhaps best known for his murals at the American Museum of Natural History.)
After the Astor Market closed down in 1917, the theater was first transformed by Thomas Healy (who also developed Pomander Walk) into an ice skating rink called Crystal Carnival. The following year, the Crystal Carnival became the Symphony Theatre. It sounds as though the opening event at the Theatre in 1918 was quite something. According to press articles of the time, the event featured an extravagant patriotic tableau depicting the destruction of a small French village by German bombardment in WWI, accompanied by a live 50-piece orchestra. I have no idea what music was performed and I’m not exactly sure what exactly happened on stage, but I am sure it was loud!
This one’s a bit of trivia that caught my attention. At the height of the Cold War, Emil Goldfus (aka Rudolf Ivanovich Abel) was exposed as a Soviet spy living and working in New York. The scandal, which came to be known as the Hollow Nickel Case, was international news in the 1950s. According to legend, one of his three key locations to pass on information to his Soviet handler was the balcony of what is now the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre! A film about this case, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, will be released next month.
Earlier this week I was talking to the filmmaker John Waters after our Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels Book Club, and he was reminiscing about the Thalia Film House in the 60s and 70s. As he pointed out, it was the place to see art-house and international films at that time. And for a certain generation, Thalia Cinema is recalled with fond memories. “That’s where I learned about films” as Martin Scorsese says. This photograph here of the Thalia is from Woody Allen’s love letter to 1970s New York Annie Hall.
To mark this birthday celebration, we are opening our season with Project Fifteen, two weeks of music, film, literature, and science events coming up in just a few weeks, and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is putting together an exhibition — Symphony Space: A Cultural Town Square — which opens on October 14.
What are your favorite memories of Symphony Space? Join the conversation right here on Medium (login required) or on our Twitter or Facebook pages!
