When producer David Merrick opened his stage version of 42ND STREET he booked the show into the Winter Garden Theatre, blocks north of the show’s namesake location. In 1980, New York’s West 42nd Street was sadly nothing like the magical place immortalized in Warren and Dubin’s delightfully catchy title song. It was, instead, a place to be avoided. Once up on a time things had been different.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, 42nd Street and the neighborhood surrounding it were poised to become the center of theater life in New York. Already during the 1880s and 90s, the city saw its theater district begin to creep north from the West 20s and 30s up Broadway’s diagonal corridor. In 1883 the Metropolitan Opera House opened on Broadway between West 39th and West 40th Streets. Across the street, the Empire Theater opened in 1893. In 1895, Oscar Hammerstein (grandfather of the lyricist Oscar II) built the Olympia Theater on Broadway between West 44th and West 45th Streets; and, in 1899, his Victoria Music Hall opened on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Impresarios George M. Cohan, David Belasco, and the Schuberts all had theaters in the area. The neighborhood was given a further boost when the New York Times relocated from lower Manhattan to a new headquarters building on LongAcre Square (the intersection of West 42nd Street, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway) and changing the site’s name to Times Square. To celebrate the opening of the new 25-floor office tower on New Year’s Eve 1904, Times publisher Adolph Ochs threw a day-long street party with a fireworks display (inaugurating what was to become an annual tradition). The next year, the city’s first subway line opened a stop at Times Square. By the 1920s, the world’s highest concentration of theaters could be found on the block-long stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The Lyric, the New Amsterdam, the Apollo, the Liberty, the Selwyn, and the Victory were among the block’s most popular venues for performances by the Marx Brothers, Fred and Adele Astaire, W.C. Fields, Jimmy Durante, the Barrymores, and the extravaganzas of Florenz Zeigfeld. 42nd Street was without a doubt the epicenter of the American stage.

The Wall Street crash of 1929 changed everything. As the Great Depression ground slowly on through the 1930s, all the theaters along 42nd Street began a long decline. In the 1930s, burlesque revues and second-run movie houses took over the once “legitimate” theaters. By 1934, only the New Amsterdam continued to operate as a legitimate theater. Few producers and theater owners who managed to keep afloat during the Depression. Those who did moved the theater district proper a few blocks north. The street itself rapidly slid into a notorious strip with hustlers and prostitutes openly working the sidewalks. In the 1940s and 50s, the block’s once glorious theaters had become XXX-rated movie houses and sex shops, drug dealers began operating in open defiance of the
police. Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was a dangerous and frightening place. A succession of city administrations tried, and failed, to reclaim the block.

By the early 1990s, public concern was so great that the city and state joined forces in an effort to rescue the block. Under the auspices of ‘The New 42nd Street,’ an autonomous, nonprofit organization, a plan was developed to revitalize the area through the restoration of the street’s historic theaters. The Victory was the first to be renovated, reopening in December1995 as the New Victory Theater, the city’s first theater for kids and families. The New Amsterdam, restored by the Walt Disney Company, reopened in spring 1997. The Liberty and Empire theaters were merged into an entertainment complex with a multi-screen cineplex and a Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The Selwyn was restored and opened in July 2000. The side-by-side Lyric (1903) and Apollo (1920) were in such a state of dilapidation that the entire fabric of both houses had to be razed. On their sites the 1,821 seat Ford Center for the Performing Arts would be built, opening in December 1997 with Broadway’s largest stage area and proscenium. The Ford Center’s architects, designers, and builders took care to salvage, restore, and incorporate what they could from the two old theaters into their new building, including a 39-by-28 foot elliptical dome from the Apollo and the Lyric’s four-story terra-cotta fa?ade embellished with the faces of Comedy and Tragedy. The most recent addition to the street’s redevelopment is the ten-story New 42nd Street Studios that opened in July 2000. This $33 million state-of-the-art facility has offices, rehearsal spaces, and a 199-set theater, The Duke on 42nd Street.

With the reclamation and restoration of its glorious old theaters, as well as the building of new venues, the second golden age of 42nd Street is now well under way. When on May 2, 2001, the revival of 42ND STREET opened at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, the lyric of the show’s title song once again rang true. The ultimate celebration of musical theater, at last found a fitting home on its namesake street.