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New York: Broadway and the Road
Visitors in New York must have often made this particular mistake, and occasionally a native, too. Strolling across town in the middle forties between Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue in the daylight hours (visitors), or hasten across town on business (natives), they will stop suddenly in front of a large poster on the doors or walls of a theater announcing one of the hits of the season. The visitor in town will see the placard for the first time. The native whose business lies in the neighborhood may have passed that bill fifty times. On this occasion visitor or native stops, looks and decides to go in and buy a couple of seats.
He tries for the nearest door and finds it locked. This does not surprise him because of a familiar practice in all theaters. Out of hours they lock all but one of their many front doors and put in a small sign saying "Please Use Other Door"; which sign the customer usually overlooks, and is much tossed about from pillar to post before he finds an open door near the box office.
This time our potential customer finds all the doors locked. The hour is not too early for box-office trade and he is puzzled. Finally he looks at the poster again, and after some time he has the answer. He finds that he is standing in front of the Saratoga Theater but the smash hit advertised on the poster is running at the Pequot Theater three blocks away. The Saratoga Theater itself is closed twenty-four hours a day; and if the frustrated customer is one who has passed by that way often he may recall that the theater has been closed for months and even for years.
Among the most depressing sights in town are the locked and shuttered theaters, of which there have been so many on the side streets of Broadway ever since the glad mad days of the twenties when we overbuilt everything from eighty-story office buildings and forty-story hotels to palatial high schools and city jails and theaters. A deserted theater is a drearier sight than an abandoned and shuttered tenement house for obvious reasons. It was built for merriment, and tenements are not. The derelict tenement house may any day be torn down and in its place a block of model housing will arisei but no one will tear down a deserted theater to build a new theater.
The saddest state of all is when this bankrupt playhouse is reduced to the grim necessity of carrying a big poster blazoning the big hit that packs in the crowds in some other theater. It is like the sandwichmen who drag themselves along the Broadway sidewalks advertising clothes they cannot hope to wear and even food that they cannot afford to eat.
But there is one very big difference between the vacant theater and the broken creature who patrols Broadway between two advertising boards. There is very little doubt of what the future holds for our brother on the sidewalks, but about an untenanted theater on the side street one can never tell. Taking them in the mass there is no question that Broadway has many more theaters than it will ever use, but individually there is no saying where the lightning will strike and happy days come back again. Year after year the citizen whose daily business lies in this neighborhood will pass by some deserted playhouse famed in story. It has been the scene of so many triumphs -- great plays, great actors, great producers, and now it stands there apparently waiting for time and the cobwebs to do their work on the pillared and sculptured façades, the spacious glittering lobbies, and the auditorium all cream and gold.
And then one day our midtown businessman on his way to or from work happens to look up at this old friend fallen on evil days and he stops short and gasps. A miracle has happened and the corpse has come to life. If it is morning there are big posters against the walls and a big sign over the marquee of the theater announcing a "new hit," only this time the play is not three blocks away in another theater but here inside. If it is late afternoon the locked doors stand wide open, all of them, and people pass in and out, and a long queue stands in front of the box office. The windows in the upper stories have come to life. You almost hear a stir among the ghosts.
What has happened? A thing not too rare in the theater. A struggling author with a weather-beaten manuscript has succeeded after years of heartbreak and short rations in finding a manager, or in finding an angel, or in finding a producer who rounds up a whole band of small-time angels, each contributing a few hundred dollars to a gamble; and the play has been staged on a shoestring and it is a hit good for a year. A year in New York playing to capacity is enough to make up for a good many untenanted years in the past and to come. In this hope the idle theaters go on living, even like the folk who play in the theaters, like the gold prospectors in the hills.
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 Points of Interest
History
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