Venue

Beacon Theatre

2124 Broadway, New York, NY 10023
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The Beacon Theatre, also known as the Beacon Theater and Hotel, is a historic New York City theater on upper Broadway in Manhattan. A 2,894-seat, three-tiered movie palace, it was designed by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager for motion pictures and vaudeville. Today it is one of New York’s leading live music and entertainment venues.

The Beacon Theatre was originally conceived by film producer Herbert Lubin in 1926 as part of a projected chain of deluxe New York City movie palaces. The planned Roxy Theatre Circuit was to be operated by Lubin and Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothafel with the famous Roxy Theatre as its flagship. Planned as the Roxy Midway Theatre, the future Beacon was designed by Walter W. Ahlschlager of Chicago, the architect of the 6,000-seat Roxy, as a smaller mate to the great Times Square theater. However, the collapse of Lubin’s fortunes doomed the Roxy scheme and the Midway was never opened. The nearly completed theater sat vacant for a time and was eventually acquired by Warner Theatres to be a first-run showcase for Warner Brothers films on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The renamed Warner’s Beacon Theatre opened on December 24, 1929. Designed as a silent film showplace, the theater’s delayed opening featured a talking picture (Tiger Rose with Lupe Velez), silent films having already become obsolete.

Later operated by Brandt Theaters, the Beacon continued as a primarily first-run movie theater into the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s Marvin Getlan and Allen Rosoff bought the theater and it began its new life as a presenter of live concerts, including a series of 1976 concerts by the Grateful Dead. In 1987, an effort to convert the theater into a nightclub was blocked in court on the grounds that it would irreparably damage the theater’s historic and protected architecture. Subsequently the theater underwent a revival in its concert hall business, filling New York’s low-to-mid-sized venue notch between the larger Radio City Music Hall and various smaller clubs and ballrooms.

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