Academy of Music

edblank on May 27, 2008 at 8:55 pm

I once bought a ticket to a Grade Z movie here in the early 1970s just because I was so curious to see the interior. Its glory days were gone, but I sat in there for a couple of years soaking up the atmosphere and never regretted the investment of time and a couple of bucks. We had moviehouses then.

Luis Vazquez on February 24, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Yeah, Palladium is just a cooler name. Alas, none of the college students at NYU would remember Palladium’s days as New York’s premier disco in the late 80’s/early 90’s, let alone its prior days as a concert venue. You would probably get a blank stare if you mention The Academy of Music.

iatse311 on February 24, 2008 at 12:45 am

that is al dimeola 5-5-78 courtesy of wolfgang’s vault great show…

jackeboy on February 16, 2008 at 8:34 pm

I worked at the Palladium as an usher in the balcony from around 1978 until Delsener closed the place down.As far as the Silkwood show I remember James Taylor was also on the bill. When he sang Mockingbird he bought out the then Mrs Taylor(Carly Simon) to sing with him. Sorry but I’m a little fuzzy on the date. I worked so many shows there, and while I remember the music the dates all run togeher.

Ed Solero on February 15, 2008 at 11:47 pm

Thanks, Stephen. I’m glad to learn that my memory may not be quite as rusty as I first thought! Well… at least not in this instance!

house on February 14, 2008 at 9:50 am

i remember the nektar show….i saw an empty seat in the front row, so i grabbed it….lotsa dry ice/fog….cool show…..there is good palladium footage on the bootleg zappa holloween mtv broadcast…interior/exterior marquee with jerry garcia on the upcomming shows….

somoman on February 11, 2008 at 11:21 pm

Hey Ed

No, the asterisks were nothing more than reminders to myself that I had to return to those listings for one reason or another. I have a slightly more thorough and accurate list that I failed to post, and I will post it within the week.

As for the Band, it didn’t occur to me during the making of the list that this was the Band’s final tour (which of course it was). So I never questioned the dates. The dates are far earlier than the Thanksiving show at Winterland, but then again, a year long tour for the Band was hardly beyond their scope of capability. Looks like a little research is in order. As for the Band playing at the Palladium, I saw the 1971 New Year’s eve show with Bob Dylan. That was fun.

By the way, I picked up Last Waltz about a year ago on Ebay. It was as good as the first time I saw it, and it gave me chills all over again. The back story of how the last show became an event is briliantly told by Scorcese as part of the DVD extras. As an aside I’ve got to say that Van Morrison, who could be aweful (moody) on any given night, gave the performance of a lifetime.

Ed Solero on February 11, 2008 at 11:01 pm

Hey Steven (sonoman)… What do the asterisks indicate on your list? At first I thought the one next to The Band’s 1976 appearance might have been to indicate the premier show under the newly christened Palladium moniker (which it was), but then I saw other shows asterisked further down the list.

Also… My memory may be faulty, but I thought that the gig by The Bank in ‘76 might have been much later in the year than March. I seem to recall that the show at their Palladium was a part of a farewell run leading up to the famous Last Waltz concert out at Winterland in San Francisco that Thanksgiving. When The Band appeared on Saturday Night Live that same week, the upcoming farewell concert was mentioned by the show’s guest host. Perhaps I’ve just mistakenly assumed that the SNL appearance was the same week of the Palladium gig. You sure that didn’t happen more like September or October of '76?

Luis Vazquez on February 11, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Attached below is a review of The Palladium discoteque which opened in the academy of Music in 1985. It’s an amazing article that describes the state of the theater before the conversion and a proper critique.

AN APPRAISAL; THE PALLADIUM: AN ARCHITECTURALLY DRAMATIC NEW DISCOTHEQUE

By PAUL GOLDBERGER
Published: May 20, 1985
Arata Isozaki is at once a great eminence of Japanese architecture and a source of some of its freshest thinking. And all sides of Mr. Isozaki are visible in the Palladium, the expansive new discotheque on East 14th Street that opened last week.

It is Mr. Isozaki’s first

American design to reach completion, and one of the most remarkable pieces of interior architecture in New York.

It is rare that a celebrated architect designs a discotheque at all, let alone decides to let this kind of project serve as his debut in a country in which he is beginning to achieve a major reputation. It is rather as if Philip Johnson were to go to Japan to design not a skyscraper, but a geisha house.

But if the match of architect and building project seems strange at first, the results at the Palladium bear out the wisdom of this unusual marriage. This is a spectacular interior, full of light and movement and genuine spatial drama.

Contrast With Studio 54

Yet it could not be further from the flashing lights and glitter of a place like Studio 54, the discotheque created by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the impresarios who are also behind the conception of the Palladium, at 126 East 14th Street. This is actually a discotheque deserving to be considered in serious architectural terms.

Mr. Rubell and Mr. Schrager are nothing if not pulse-takers of the moment, and they have correctly divined that architecture has a chic in the 1980’s that it did not have in the 70’s.

They also knew that Mr. Isozaki’s architecture, which imbues simple geometric forms with a kind of primal energy, has been getting more and more attention in architectural circles, and that he had been chosen to design the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. This is certain to be one of the most talked-about museums in the country when it is finished next year.

Structure Within a Shell

What more natural match, then, than themselves and Mr. Isozaki to create the discotheque that would be for this decade what Studio 54 was for the last? It could almost be dismissed as a cynical exploitation of architecture’s current trendiness – if the results were not so truly excellent.

The Palladium has been built within the shell of the old Academy of Music, a movie palace of faded grandeur that has presided, like a glum but self-assured dowager, since 1926 over the block of 14th Street east of Union Square.

The old theater had never been sliced into smaller parts, like so many great movie houses of its era, but neither had it been well cared for. By the time the owners of the Palladium took it over, it had fallen into a state of deep, almost sordid, dinginess.

But the theater’s ornate architecture was essentially intact, and that set the theme for the design. The Academy of Music’s original architecture was not gutted, and neither was it cleaned up to any substantial degree. Instead, it was allowed to remain, rich and crumbling, as a background for a structure Mr. Isozaki designed to be set within it.

Mr. Isozaki’s new structure is set at what was the loge level of the old theater; the orchestra level and the old stage have been entirely covered up with new construction.

The new structure is a great grid of horizontal and vertical pieces mounting up for several stories, with a proscenium-like arch leaping across their middle. Within it is the main dance floor; behind it, most of the original mezzanine and balcony remain, permitting visitors to climb up and look down on the activity within the Isozaki structure.

The old auditorium is so vast that it can contain this foreign object, as big as a building, without seeming to blink an eye. Indeed, making this unusual juxtaposition work is the central point of Mr. Isozaki’s design – he is setting up an architectural dialogue in which an old container and a new thing contained within it are completely different, yet each maintains its integrity.

The Romance of Decay

The old movie palace is mysterious and ornate, seeming to hold within it the romance of generations; it has been left in its crumbling state to enhance this romantic, slightly eerie quality.

Mr. Isozaki’s insertion is crisp, hard and direct, revealing all. It is not hard to see that Mr. Isozaki is not merely juxtaposing two kinds of architecture, or old objects and new – he is really using each portion of this building as part of a much broader metaphor, exploring softness and hardness, decay and renewal, warmth and coolness, even mystery and revelation.

If all of this suggests that the Palladium is as solemn as a church, it is not so at all – it is in fact quite exuberant, with spectacular lighting effects, a fine palette of colors and altogether remarkable works of art.

The consortium of artists enlisted to participate in this venture is as much of the moment as the architect. It includes Francesco Clemente, who has painted a set of somewhat melancholy, but nicely colored, frescoes over a portion of the vaulted ceiling in one of the old theater’s vestibules; Kenny Scharf, who has turned the lower lounge into an almost magical arrray of decorations, comic-book icons, fake fur and mirrors and toys that suggest a perverse version of a Warner LeRoy restaurant, and Keith Haring, who has designed a huge graffiti mural for the rear wall of the stage.

But most startling of all may be the use of video screens as part of the art and architecture.

This is not the first time video has become part of a discotheque, of course, but it is surely the first time two huge banks of 25 television monitors each have been set within huge frames that are raised and lowered, like pieces of a stage set. The frames are designed in the shape of a Rolls-Royce grille, which may or may not be a comment on the leanings of the discotheque crowd in the 1980’s.

But whatever it means, the visual power of this array of television sets is undeniable – particularly given the use of advanced video technology that permits an image either to be seen in small size on each screen or in vast size, with all the monitors joined together to make an immense image that is as large as the one seen on a movie screen.

All of this goes on within Mr. Iso-zaki’s gridded structure, the inside of which is filled with softly glowing lights and is, in effect, the focus of all activity. But there are subsidiary spaces as well in the Palladium, including a ‘'back room’‘ that carries the metaphor of the building one step farther.

The back room has been made even dingier than it was when Mr. Rubell and Mr. Schrager found it, and instead of the ornament of the main theater, there is an exposed steel girder cutting across it; inside, in deliberate contrast, is elegant furniture and tuxedoed waiters.

A Single Classical Column

That is a bit coy. But the architectural sequence Mr. Isozaki devised for the entrance to the whole place is anything but. The exterior and the outer vestibule have been left in their raw state, making a startling contrast within the doors to a white lobby, in which a single classical column, enclosed by new walls, stands high up straight ahead.

Beyond this stark entrance, deliberately neutral, the space opens up to a vast lobby, 120 feet long with undulating green walls and green columns on a purple and turquoise carpet, with a low ceiling to create a sense of compression. The colors here, as elsewhere, were selected with the help of Andree Putman, the gifted Parisian interior designer who collaborated with Mr. Isozaki on numerous details of the Palladium design.

A grand double staircase, the sleekest, most high-tech element in the place, climbs upward from here to the level of the discotheque itself.

Its floor, and the floor of a huge landing, are made up of 2,400 round lights set in round glass block. To walk up it is to walk on light, and it is a magical feeling – the stair contains within it both the hardness of the new Isozaki structure and, thanks to the light, the softness of the old theater, merging them all into a unified whole.

Ziggy on February 11, 2008 at 10:47 am

Well, the first paragraph is wrong also. The original “Academy of Music” was not the first home for the Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan Opera company was actually started by wealthy people who were unable to get boxes at the Academy, so they started their own rival opera house.

Ken Roe on February 10, 2008 at 5:53 pm

Jerry, Thanks for posting the photo of the City Theatre, it is not the Academy of Music though. It is the City Theatre, located just along the street at number 114 E. 14th Street. The City Theatre has its own page /theaters/1326/

jflundy on February 10, 2008 at 4:35 pm

At some time in the late 1930’s this theater received a new moderne facade, vertical and marquee. It may have been leased by another entity prior to this make over, perhaps Warner (after theater was black for a while, something that happened in other periods with this theater… I recall it being closed for a period in 1950 )but this will take more research to establish. It was called the City Theater. In 1938 it was playing a double feature, “ Port of Seven Seas” with Wallace Beery and Frank Morgan and “Richman Poor Girl” with Lew Ayres, Maureen O'Sullivan and Robert Young. This was an all MGM bill. I have seen a copy of a photo showing this, with Luchow’s restaurant next door to it confirming it is indeed the Academy of Music building.