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The lights of the Kiruna mine looked like a flurry of fireflies, as I strained my eyes to see the sights out the window as the bus rolled toward my hotel. I had landed in Sápmi — the region often referred to as the Lapland — in the evening. It didn’t much matter, though. In the Arctic Circle, daylight is only two or three hours long.
Kiruna was built to support the LKAB-run mine in the 1890s. However, in 2004, it was revealed that the town was in danger of collapsing into the sprawling mine, which had grown into the world’s largest iron ore mine. Now, the entire Swedish town is in the process of moving 3 km east.
So, when I recently heard that a theater in New York City had been raised 30 feet higher than its current elevation, I admittedly felt blasé about it. What’s one landmark in comparison to an entire town? But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how engineers could securely lift a 14-million pound theater in such a dense location as Times Square, where the countless dazzling neon signs made even the middle of the night seem bright.
Yet that’s exactly what they did with New York City’s Palace Theatre. Here’s how they did it — and why they bothered to go to all that effort.
Sure, Frank Sinatra might’ve meant New York in general when he sang that if you could make it here, you could make it anywhere, but for many performers “making it” means “playing the Palace.” After all, not only did Ol’ Blue Eyes himself perform at New York City’s Palace Theatre, but so have Judy Garland, Will Rogers, Jerry Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Diana Ross, and many more iconic performers.
Although it’s not the oldest theater to operate continuously on Broadway — that distinction goes to the Lyceum Theatre, which was built in 1903 — it’s said that the Palace Theatre is the Broadway venue that “inspired them all.”
That said, it was not immediately successful. The Palace Theatre opened in March 1913 as a vaudeville house. It took booking Sarah Bernhardt to put it on the map.
Even if you don’t follow Broadway theater, you’ve likely heard of at least some of the musicals that have graced the stage of the Palace since then: La Cage aux Follies (1983); Beauty and the Beast (1994); Aida (2000); Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (2011); An American in Paris (2015); and many more.
The founder of the theatre rose to success thanks to an artful pivot. Martin Beck emigrated from Eastern Europe with a group of actors to the U.S. When his vaudeville troupe split, the failed actor went on to manage the Orpheum Concert Saloon. This, in turn, grew into the famed Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit of more than 60 theaters.
Beck hired Charles Kirchhoff and Thomas Rose to design the Palace Theatre at 1564 Broadway — or as a New Yorker would put it, 47th Street and Seventh Avenue — in Times Square. Like many structures in Manhattan, it was a multipurpose building. At the base of an office building, the Milwaukee architects created the three-level theater.
At 88 by 125 feet, the Palace could seat more than 1,800 at the time (later this was reduced to closer to about 1,700). Although the Palace was one of the largest Broadway theaters, it still felt intimate. This was due to Kirchhoff & Rose’s inclusion of private boxes. This feature was in keeping with vaudeville audience preferences.
The Palace Theatre cost $1 million. Akin to its name, the palatial theater featured Sienna marble in the lobby, stained-glass doors, gold silk brocade, and a 14-foot-wide chandelier, among other treasured Beaux Arts features.
The last vaudeville act took place at the Palace in fall 1932. Falling on hard times and changing tastes, from 1915 all the way up to 1966, it served as a movie theater.
The fact that the theater was situated inside a multipurpose building turned out to be an important detail. Today, the auditorium is the only part of the original construction to still exist.
When the Nederlanders acquired the Palace in 1965, they restored it. Then, in the 1980s, The Embassy Suites — later the DoubleTree Suites — moved the entrance of the theater when they began construction on their hotel. In the 1990s, the theater’s exterior was replaced. Then, in 2019, the DoubleTree was torn down to make room for TSX Broadway, a 550,000-square-foot “immersive experience” offering Times Square its largest terrace.
Fortunately, the auditorium interior is preserved as a city landmark and remains intact.
To make way for more commercial space, TSX Broadway decided to raise the Palace Theatre 30 feet higher than where it had been for about a century. The project to lift the 14-million-pound theater began in January of this year.
To accomplish this engineering feat, a team of experts was brought in. They included the architect of theater design and historic preservation PBDW Architects, the architect of record Mancini Duffy, the structural engineering consultant Severud, the building envelope lead designer Perkins Eastman, consultant for the support of excavation and foundation engineering Langan, and lift engineer Urban Foundation/Engineering.
Essentially, the team disconnected the theater from its foundation and hoisted it up on a platform. From under the theater box, they implemented new technology that was a hybrid between a hydraulic jack and a structural steel shoring post to raise it up about 7 inches a day. It reportedly took 34 hydraulic jacks four months. When it reached what would be the third floor of the new 46-story TSX Broadway building, the theater was then secured in place with fresh concrete and super-columns. You can see video of the construction here.
Image Credit: Sociopath987 / Shutterstock.com
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