The Palace Theater then                               The Palace Theatre now

He loved to book famous people on the strength of their fame alone, for he knew that, though their acts could be incredibly lame, their drawing power wasn’t. As such, athletes like Babe Ruth, John L. Sullivan and Jack Johnson; cartoonists like Windsor McCay, Bud Fisher, and Rube Goldberg; explorers like Captain Cook; and Lady Hope and the Hope Diamond graced his stage. He presented Helen Keller as an act. He also presented Sadakichi Hartmann, who gave a “perfume concert” using a special machine that produced the scents of lilacs, and other artificial aromas. He was cancelled after one performance, which is a pity, for I feel certain it would have been the one act Ms. Keller could have appreciated. 

Understand that these acts were just the icing on the cake; they gave the place its special flavor. When combined with the requisite assortment of singers, comedians, acrobats, magicians and so forth, it was the best variety show in town. You got your money’s worth at Hammerstein’s. In fact, you got too much. The shows (two daily) were over fours hour long: a matinee from 1:45-6pm, and an evening one from 7:45-12am! Nobody with a life stayed for the whole show. 

The other amenity offered by the Victoria was the roof garden, which permitted the management to continue presenting vaudeville shows throughout the summer in those hellacious days before air conditioning. The roof was advertised to be several degrees cooler than street level, though with the sun beating down up there, it was actually many degrees hotter. Willie corrected that effect by heating the elevator that brought the customers up, so that stepping out onto the roof actually felt like a relief.

To the distress of vaudevillians and their New York audiences, Hammerstein passed away in 1914. The Victoria lasted until 1915, when it was converted to a movie house called the Rialto. By that time, big time vaudeville had a new home anyway, the most famous theatre of all: The Palace. 

Built in 1913 as the flagship for the big time vaudeville circuit run by E.F. Albee (grandfather of the playwright) and Martin Beck, manager of the Western Vaudeville Managers Association, the Palace was the perfect showplace for the biggest of big time vaudeville during the last two decades of its existence. The Palace became a show business Mecca. All the top acts would play there: Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, the Marx Brothers, Nora Bayes, Smith and Dale, Frank Fay, Jack Benny…the list goes on and on. The Palace was a cherished showcase gig because the audience was full of bookers, scouts, agents, and fellow performers. Comedian Ed Lowry said opening day at the Palace was as exciting as the Kentucky Derby. The sidewalk out front, called the Palace “beach” was a popular hangout for industry professionals looking to network. For a vaudevillian, to have “played the Palace” was to have died and gone to heaven. Which is why that expression lives on in popular idiom, long after anyone even remembers what it used to mean. 

    Only a vaudevillian who has trod its stage can really tell you about it. Audiences can tell you about who they saw there and how they enjoyed them, but only a performer can describe the anxieties, the joys, the anticipation, and the exultation of a week’s engagement at the Palace. The walk through the iron gate on 47th Street through the courtyard to the stage door, was the cum laude walk to a show business diploma. A feeling of ecstasy came with the knowledge that this was the Palace, the epitome of the more than 15,000 vaudeville theatres in America, and the realization that you have been selected to play it. Of all the thousands upon thousands of vaudeville performers in the business, you are there. This was a dream fulfilled; this was the pinnacle of variety success.

                            -- Jack Haley

The Palace became the focal point of a new twentieth-century aesthetic of snazz, of pizzaz, of (as Variety abbreviated it) “show biz”. The breezy new spirit was perhaps embodied most successfully in the personality of Bob Hope, wisecracking, confident, comfortable – here was the future. 

At least, that’s the way it seemed at the time. As we know today, entertainment’s future, already a million dollar industry by the time of vaudeville’s founding, came on little strips of celluloid. By 1932, the Palace was only the last straight two-a-day Big time vaudeville house left in New York, and the flagship of the R.K.O. chain, which was not only a movie theatre chain, but a production company as well. That last Palace two-a-day (May, 1932) is considered by some to be the symbolic end of vaudeville. In July of that year, the Palace played its first feature film (Eddie Cantor’s The Kid from Spain) and from then on continued experimenting with various combinations of vaudeville and films until 1935, when they dropped the vaudeville format altogether (although it would be revived sporadically as late as the 1950s). Today, the Palace theatre is a top Broadway house, the present home of “All Shook Up”. The nearby Martin Beck theatre (at45th Street), named for the Palace’s founder, was renamed the Al Hirschfeld in 2003. The history is still there; you just have to look a little harder for it. 

Trav S.D. is the author of  "No Applause – Just Throw Money: The Book that Made Vaudeville Famous," published in November 2005 by Faber and Faber, an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2005 D. Travis Stewart. All rights reserved.