The Theater
The Brooklyn Theater opened on October 2, 1871 and stood near the south east corner of Washington and Johnson streets, one block north of what was then Brooklyn's City Hall. It was owned by The Brooklyn Building Association, a partnership of affluent Brooklyn residents including Abner C. Keeney, William Kingsley, and Judge Alexander McCue. After its destruction, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle had called it Brooklyn's "principal theater." Up until the last twenty months of its existence, the theater had been managed by Sara G. and Frederick B. Conway, a couple long involved in New York and Brooklyn theater and who had managed Brooklyn's Park Theatre from 1864 to 1871. Sara Conway died in April 1875, about a half a year after her husband. Following a brief, unsuccessful management stint by their children, Albert M. Palmer and Sheridan Shook, respectively, manager and proprietor of New York's Union Square Theatre, assumed a new lease on the Brooklyn Theatre in August 1875 and managed it until the catastrophe took place.
The Brooklyn Theatre stood a block from Fulton Street, the main thoroughfare to the Manhattan ferries and readily accessible to both New York and Brooklyn residents. It seated about 1,600 patrons. Both Conway and Shook and Palmer sought out upscale productions with well-known actors and actresses. The Brooklyn Theater became a well-respected house in Brooklyn's nascent theater district, which included the smaller and older Park, Olympic, and Globe theaters.
Read more about this topic: Brooklyn Theater Fire
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)