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Classicism in New York Theatre Architecture: 1825–1850
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
Nathaniel Currier's spectacular lithograph of the “Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York” (1), is one of the most well-known images depicting a nineteenth-century U.S. theatre building left to us by the popular pictorial reporting of that prephotographic era. The background of the event in terms of drama history is familiar, when It is the building itself, as a theatrical monument, that we tend to overlook, except for its appeal as a bygone relic, and architecturally it is easy to dismiss it as simply another manifestation of the rage which was caustically described by the New York correspondent of The Architectural Magazine (London) in 1834: One factor which discourages the theatre historian is the difficulty of relating any one theatre of the period with other examples in a city, let alone the country.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1965
References
NOTES
1 Moody, Richard, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), p. 2.Google Scholar
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3 The present article is based on study initiated at the Ohio State University Theatre Collection, with pictorial archives organized under its director, John H. McDowell. Necessity limits us to selective highlights of New York theatres of the time, and interior construction, lighting, and stock inventories are here excluded.
4 New-York Evening Post, XLV (November 12, 1847), 2.
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11 New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Print Collection, item 24.66.442.
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14 New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Print Collection, item 24.66.1402, A. J. Davis Scrapbook, Vol. 3, p. 140.
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