Lyceum Theatre
Built: 1903
Architects: Herts and Tallant
NEW YORK— Broadway’s oldest continuously operating legitimate theater, the Lyceum, is also the first Broadway theater designated a landmark.
The Beaux-Arts style, which drew from Imperial Roman architecture as well as the Italian Renaissance and ancient Greek styles, was utilized in the form of six Corinthian columns in front of a gray limestone facade.
Architects Henry Herts and Hugh Tallant studied in Paris, and also designed other New York theaters, including the New Amsterdam and the Folies Bergere.
“With its rich array of architectural details, the theater is visually dramatic and recalls an exciting era in American theatrical history and of the theatrical world at the turn of the century,” states a 1974 Landmarks Preservation Commission document.
On 45th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, the theater’s eye-catching facade made it popular, though with only 950 seats it is one of the smallest theaters Broadway has to offer.
The Lyceum was designed to attract a “more cultured audience,” wrote Abbott Moore in an article titled “Individualism in Architecture—The Works of Herts & Tallant,” “and stand as a fitting frame for the conservative works of the most distinguished dramatists.”
The foyer leads to a coffered auditorium ceiling, sunken panels along a graceful arch.
When the theater opened, it used innovative ventilation: air passed over ice chambers to keep patrons cool in the summer, and over steam coils to produce the opposite effect in the winter.
Theater Manager David Frohman, who had the theater built, included an apartment above the theater, complete with a balcony and, “small door that offers a bird’s eye view of the stage below,” according to the theater’s website.
“Legend had it that Frohman waved a white handkerchief out the open door to tell his wife, the actress Margaret Illington, that she was overacting.”
With reporting by Calvin Xue He
