Madison Square Theatre

Madison Square Theatre (New York). In 1879 Steele MacKaye gutted what had been Augustin Daly's first Fifth Avenue Theatre and which had been restored only two years before after a disastrous fire in 1873. He redesigned the playhouse into one of the world's most ingenious theatres, with an elevator stage that allowed rapid scene changes, with the orchestra playing from a box above the proscenium, and with the first attempt at a primitive air‐conditioning system. The house seated only about seven hundred playgoers and was so arranged as to give the impression of a drawing room. George Odell recalled, “The exquisite interior, in which no color seemed to prevail at the expense of others. . .gave an effect of rich, simple elegance hitherto unknown in New York theatres.” MacKaye's intention was to form a stock company on the order of the Comédie Française. Although the theatre housed Hazel Kirke, the longest‐running drama up to its time under MacKaye, its actual owners, the Mallory brothers, editors of a religious publication, squeezed out the often‐impractical playwright. It then came under the management first of Daniel Frohman, then of Albert M. Palmer, and later of Charles Hoyt, who temporarily called it Hoyt's Theatre. By the time of Hoyt's death, the theatre district had moved away from the area and, though the original name had been restored, bookings became difficult. The building was demolished in 1908.