That's the New Amsterdam Theatre — the ornate one wedged into the middle of the block, with the deep arched entrance and all the curling stonework that doesn't match a single thing around it.
When it opened in nineteen oh-three, it was the most beautiful theater anyone in America had ever built — Art Nouveau, which meant vines carved into the walls, peacocks worked into the plaster, flowers climbing the proscenium arch. And for two decades it belonged to a producer named Florenz Ziegfeld, who had worked out something nobody else had: you could sell spectacle on its own. No plot required. Just staircases, feathers, and an enormous number of showgirls, staged once a year at ruinous expense. He called the show the Follies, and his slogan was Glorifying the American Girl. He put that on the posters, without embarrassment, for twenty-four years.
The Follies weren't even the whole operation. There was a SECOND theater on the roof. It opened as the Aerial Gardens, and Ziegfeld took it over
and ran what he called the Midnight Frolic. So you'd watch the Follies downstairs. Then, if you had money and no responsibilities, you went up to the roof at midnight and watched a different show entirely. Same building, two theaters, stacked.
Then the twentieth century happened to Forty-Second Street. The theater slid down the ladder one rung at a time until it was showing double features to who
