Everything about this corner tells you a theater should be at street level. The Palace is thirty feet above your head, sitting inside the tower with the giant screen wrapped around its base — the entire auditorium, a hundred and thirteen years old, hoisted off the pavement and left there.
It opened in nineteen thirteen as a vaudeville house for a producer named Martin Beck, and it opened badly. The construction had run over, the ticket prices were higher than anywhere else in town, the reviews were unkind, and Beck was looking at a very expensive hole in the ground. So he went and got the most famous actress on earth.
Sarah Bernhardt was in her late sixties, she was French, she was theatrical royalty, and she was willing to do vaudeville — which was roughly like a Nobel laureate agreeing to appear on a game show. Audiences came in enormous numbers to see whether it was really her. She saved the building, and within a few years the Palace was the top of the entire profession.
It got
into the language. If you were a comic or a dancer or a man who juggled hats, the whole point of your career was PLAYING THE PALACE. Two shows a day, and if you did well here, you had done well everywhere. There was a specific slot in the running order that performers dreaded, and the whole profession understood the hierarchy of where your name sat on the bill without anyone having to explain it.
