The Roxy Theatre was a 5,920 seat movie theater located at 153 West 50th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, just off Times Square in New York City.
It opened on March 11, 1927, with the silent film The Love of Sunya, produced by and starring Gloria Swanson. The huge movie palace was a leading Broadway film showcase through the 1950s and was also noted for its lavish stage shows. It closed and was demolished in 1960.
The Roxy Theatre was originally conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin in mid-1925 as the world's largest and finest motion picture palace.
To realize his dream, Lubin brought in the successful and innovative theater operator Samuel L. Rothafel, aka Roxy, to bring it to fruition, enticing him with a large salary, percentage of the profits, stock options and offering to name the theatre after him. It was intended to be the first of six planned Roxy Theatres in the New York area.
Roxy determined to make his theater the summit of his career and in it realize all of his theatrical design and production ideas. He worked with Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager and decorator Harold Rambusch of Rambusch Decorating Company on every aspect of the theater's design and furnishings.
Roxy's lavish ideas and his many changes ran up costs dramatically. Lubin, who was $2.5 million over budget and near bankruptcy, sold his controlling interest a week before the theater opened to movie mogul and theater owner William Fox for $5 million. The final cost of the theater was $12 million. With Lubin's exit, Roxy's dreams of his own theater circuit also ended. Only one of the projected Roxy chain was built, the planned Roxy Midway Theatre on Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, also designed by Ahlschlager. The nearly complete theater was sold to Warner Bros. who opened it as Warner's Beacon in 1929.
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The Roxy closed on March 29, 1960. The final movie was The Wind Cannot Read, a British film with Dirk Bogarde which opened March 9.
The Roxy had been acquired by Rockefeller Center in 1956, and then sold to developer William Zeckendorf. It was initially purchased to obtain air rights for the Time-Life Building, built to its east, and was finally demolished by Zeckendorf for an expansion of the Taft Hotel and for an office building that is now connected to the Time-Life building.
Eliot Elisofon's photograph of Gloria Swanson amidst the ruins of the theater's demolition appeared in the November 7, 1960 issue of LIFE.
The theater can briefly be seen from the air during its demolition in the opening prologue of the film West Side Story, across 7th Avenue from the back of the Winter Garden Theatre.
The spectacular stage and screen programming ideas of the Roxy's founder continued at Radio City Music Hall into the 1970s. Radio City's lavish Christmas stage show, created in 1933 by the Roxy's former producer and choreographer, Leon Leonidoff and Russell Markert, continues to this day as the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
The Music Hall itself was saved from demolition by a consortium of preservation and commercial interests in 1979 and it remains one of New York's entertainment landmarks. Its restored interior includes the lavish art deco offices created for Roxy Rothafel, preserved partly as a tribute to the visionary showman.
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