WHENEVER I’M feeling down, or up, or really much of anything, I go to Times Square. More specifically, I go to the theater on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. It’s not your typical Broadway theater, per se—though it’s got as much charm as any other building that’s survived decades of razing and reconstruction. It opened as the Eltinge in 1912, designed by famed architect Thomas Lamb and financed by producer A. H. Woods. Photos from that era show a vaulted ceiling rising high and cavernous, with opera boxes overlooking an ornate proscenium arch. Both Clark Gable and Lawrence Olivier graced its stage before moving on to successful Hollywood careers.
These days, it’s an AMC with twentyfive screens. What was once the original theater is now the lobby, with two escalators running parallel up through the atrium. The balcony sits unused and truncated; the opera boxes offer nothing but a view of the ticket counter. Posters for upcoming films hang in decorative alcoves—recesses that look like boarded-up doorframes. What I suspect was an attempt to retain some of the history instead reads like modernism grafted onto antiquity—as if your local malt shop started using touchscreens. Even for the uninitiated, the result is slightly disconcerting.
It’s not all bad, though. A third and fourth escalator ascend to the main concession stand, where a wall of plexiglass greets attendees with the natural light missing from the ground floor. Successive escalators rise higher and higher—to the fourth floor, the fifth, the sixth—like scaling a mountain minus all the hard work. What follows is one of the best (if not cheapest) views of Midtown: all the epileptic lights and billboards, the swelling spires of competitive skyscrapers, a leftover Yahoo sign that no one’s bothered to remove. Even if you’re about to be thrust into a
