Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue at 1260 Avenue of the Americas, within Rockefeller Center, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Nicknamed the Showplace of the Nation, it is the headquarters for the Rockettes, the precision dance company.
Radio City Music Hall was designed by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey in the Art Deco style.
Radio City Music Hall was built on a plot of land that was originally intended for a Metropolitan Opera House, although plans for the opera house were canceled in 1929. It opened on December 27, 1932, as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center.
The 5,960-seat Music Hall was the larger of two venues built for Rockefeller Center's Radio City section, the other being Center Theatre. It was largely successful until the 1970s, when declining patronage nearly drove the Music Hall to bankruptcy.
Radio City Music Hall was designated a New York City Landmark in May 1978, and the Music Hall was restored and allowed to remain open. The hall was extensively renovated in 1999.
One of the more notable parts of the Music Hall is its large auditorium, which was the world's largest when the Hall first opened. The Music Hall also contains a variety of art. Although Radio City Music Hall was initially intended to host stage shows, within a year of its opening it was converted into a movie palace, hosting performances in a film-and-stage-spectacle format through the 1970s, and was the site of several movie premieres. It now primarily hosts concerts, including by leading pop and rock musicians, and live stage shows such as the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.
The Music Hall has also hosted televised events including the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the NFL Draft.
The construction of Rockefeller Center occurred between 1932 and 1940 on land that John D. Rockefeller Jr. leased from Columbia University.The Rockefeller Center site was originally supposed to be occupied by a new opera house for the Metropolitan Opera.
By 1928, Benjamin Wistar Morris and designer Joseph Urban were hired to come up with blueprints for the house. However, the new building was too expensive for the opera to fund by itself, and it needed an endowment, and the project ultimately gained the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
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The planned opera house was cancelled in December 1929 due to various issues, but Rockefeller made a deal with RCA to develop Rockefeller Center as a mass media complex with four theaters. This was later downsized to two theaters.
Construction on Radio City Music Hall started in December 1931, and the hall topped out in August 1932. Its construction set many records at the time, including the use of 24,000 km of copper wire and 320 km of brass pipe.
In November 1932, Russell Markert's précision dance troupe the Roxyettes, later to be known as the Rockettes, left the Roxy Theatre and announced that they would be moving to the Music Hall. By then, Roxy was busy adding music acts in preparation for the hall's opening at the end of the year.
The Music Hall opened to the public on December 27, 1932, with a lavish stage show featuring numbers including Ray Bolger, Doc Rockwell, Martha Graham, The Mirthquakers, and Patricia Bowman.
The opening was meant to be a return to high-class variety entertainment. However, the opening was not a success: the program was very long, spanning from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. of the next day, and a multitude of acts were crammed onto the world's largest stage, ensuring that individual acts were lost in the cavernous hall. As the premiere went on, audience members, including John Rockefeller Jr, waited in the lobby or simply left early.
Through the 1960s, the Music Hall was successful regardless of the status of the city's economic, business, and entertainment sectors as a whole. It remained open even as other theaters such as the Paramount and the Roxy closed. Even so, officials had intended to close down Radio City Music Hall in 1962, in what would become one of several such unheeded announcements.
By
1964, the Radio City Music Hall was projected to have 5.7 million
annual visitors, who paid ticket prices of between 99 cents and $2.75,
equivalent to between $6 and $18 in 2019.
The hall had evolved to show fewer adult-oriented films, instead choosing to show films for general audiences. However, the Music Hall's operating costs were almost twice as high as those of smaller performance venues. In addition, with the loosening of regulations on explicit content, the Music Hall's audience was mostly relegated to families.
By January 1978, the Music Hall was in debt, and officials stated that it could not remain open after April. Alton Marshall, president of Rockefeller Center, announced that due to a projected loss of $3.5 million for the upcoming year, Radio City Music Hall would close on April 12.
Plans for alternate uses for the structure included converting the theater into tennis courts, a shopping mall, an aquarium, a hotel, a theme park, or the American Stock Exchange.
Upon hearing the announcement, Rosemary Novellino, Dance Captain of the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Company, formed the Showpeople's Committee to Save Radio City Music Hall. The Committee consisted of an alliance between performers, the media, and political allies including New York lieutenant governor Mary Anne Krupsak.
The public also made hundreds of calls to Rockefeller Center, and The New York Times described that the callers jammed the switchboards there. The Rockettes also protested outside New York City Hall.
Following the closure announcement, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the interior as a city landmark on March 29. This designation was contested, and Rockefeller Center Inc. unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit to try to reverse the landmark designation.
On April 8, four days before the planned closing date, the Empire State Development Corporation voted to create a nonprofit subsidiary to lease the Music Hall. One month later, on May 12, Radio City Music Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
After its near-closure and subsequent reopening, Radio City Music Hall diversified its selection of shows and performances. Time slots were set aside for movie screenings, but the Music Hall had mostly turned to stage shows.
By January 1980, the Music Hall was hosting shows such as the stage adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Rockettes Spectacular. However, the theatrical shows proved to be unpopular, so in 1983, the Radio City Music Hall shifted to creating music concerts and participating in the production of films and TV shows.
The parent company, Radio City Music Hall Productions (a subsidiary of Rockefeller Center Inc.), started creating or co-creating films and Broadway shows such as Legs and Brighton Beach Memoirs.
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In 1985, Radio City Music Hall finally recorded its first profit in three decades, with a net gain of $2.5 million that year. This was partly attributed to the addition of music concerts, which appealed toward younger viewers. The Music Hall also started hosting televised events including the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Daytime Emmy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, and the NFL Draft.
A new golden curtain was installed at the main stage in January 1987. The curtain was the third one to be installed since the Music Hall's opening in 1932; it had last been replaced in 1965. Because of the Radio City Music Hall's historic status, the curtain had to be the same style, texture, and color as the previous curtains.
In 1997, Radio City Music Hall was leased to the Madison Square Garden Company, then known as Cablevision. This move provided funding to keep the Rockettes and the Christmas Spectacular at the Music Hall; in addition, Cablevision would be able to renovate and manage the hall.
Radio City Music Hall was closed on February 16, 1999, for a comprehensive renovation. During the closure, many components were cleaned and modernized. The curtains were replaced, seats were reupholstered, carpets were relaid, and doorknobs and light fixtures were replaced.
Radio City Music Hall is on the east side of Sixth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. Located in a niche partially under the neighboring 1270 Avenue of the Americas, the Music Hall is housed under the building's first setback on the seventh floor.
Its exterior is notable for a long marquee sign that wraps around the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, as well as narrower, seven-story-high signs on the north and south ends of the marquee's Sixth Avenue side; both signs display the hall's name in neon letters.
The main entrance to the Music Hall was placed at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, underneath the marquee. The entrance's location, which was enhanced by the amount of open space in front of that corner, ensured that the hall could easily be seen from the Broadway theater district a block to the west.
An entrance to the New York City Subway's 47th-50th Streets-Rockefeller Center station, served by the B, D, F, <F>, and M trains, is located on Sixth Avenue directly adjacent to the north end of the marquee, within the same structure that houses Radio City Music Hall.
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When a movie opened -if you lived in New York,
you would see it at Radio City Music Hall
where it would play a couple of weeks,
and then you moved on to the next movie.
Robert Osborne
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