On your right, this ordinary-looking corner once held one of Chelsea’s biggest stages... and one of its wildest stories. In eighteen sixty-eight, Cincinnati distiller and entrepreneur Samuel N. Pike spent one million dollars here, well over twenty million in today’s money, to open Pike’s Opera House on land that once belonged to Clement Clarke Moore, the man whose estate, Chelsea, gave this neighborhood its name.
Picture the room: a vast auditorium rising seventy feet from the parquet, the main floor seats, up to the dome, with six elegant boxes framing the stage opening and two stacked balconies above. Officially, it held eighteen hundred people. Unofficially? Popular nights packed in more than thirty-five hundred. The very first performance, on the ninth of January, eighteen sixty-eight, was Verdi’s Il trovatore, followed by seven operettas by Jacques Offenbach in just four months. You can almost hear the mix of soaring Italian tragedy and wickedly witty French melody bouncing off the walls.
But glamour did not guarantee profit. Competition from the Academy of Music downtown hurt business, and in January of eighteen sixty-nine, railroad titans Jim Fisk and Jay Gould took over and renamed it the Grand Opera House. Fisk pushed operetta and drama, including Offenbach’s La Périchole, which got its American premiere here. He also turned the second floor into Erie Railway headquarters... and during the gold-market panic known as Black Friday, he barricaded himself inside.
Then the story turned dark. After Edward S. Stokes shot Fisk, mourners laid Fisk’s body in state in the grand lobby. Later managers struggled, until John F. Poole and Thomas Lester Donnelly lowered ticket prices and filled the house with crowd-pleasers like Buffalo Bill and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, plus variety acts between scenes. In nineteen thirty-eight, the old theater became an R-K-O movie house, then demolition and fire erased it in nineteen sixty, making way for Penn South.
This corner, open all day and all week, still feels like a stage where Chelsea’s taste for spectacle never really left. When you’re ready, let’s head on to the School of Visual Arts.
