Broadway
Broadway is not only the name of the oldest professional theatres in New York City, but also the entire part of the city and it refers specifically to plays, musicals, and operas performed in the largest theatres in the district near Time Square. From 1920 until the very early 1950s, most new onstage shows written in the United States originated there, and productions in other areas were usually copies of Broadway productions.
Broadway itself was confined and standardized; it consisted of an area in Manhattan roughly six blocks long and a block and a half wide. Over 15 miles long within city limits, the area, known to tourists and theater-goers as Broadway, stretches from W.41st Street, where the Nederlander Theater is located, up to W. 53rd Street's Broadway Theater. Only four theaters are located physically on Broadway, the Marquis at 46th Street, the Palace at 47th Street, the Winter Garden at 50th Street and the Broadway at 53rd. The thirty or more theatres located in these few blocks were about the same size, seating between 700 and 1,400 people. It had the same style of architecture as well as the same type of proscenium or picture-frame staging (which is an arch or frame surrounding the stage opening in a box or picture stage).
This was not always the case. In 1810, if you wandered up Broadway, north from the Battery (which is now know as Bowling Green) towards the villages of Greenwich or Harlem farther to the north of the common pasture, Sheep's Meadow; past Wall St. and Maiden Lane, at City Hall Park you would have passed The beautiful Park Theater on Park Row. In the 1900-1901 season there were seventy plays or musicals being produced on Broadway. It was the beginning of the boom, and the decades that followed saw that number quadruple. In addition, there were seven Vaudeville houses and six Burlesque theaters presenting their soon to be called "Broadway shows" to a theater thirsty population of just over three and a...
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