Belasco Theatre

David Belasco opened this Broadway house at 111 West 44th Street on 16 October 1907 as the Stuyvesant, and he built it to feel like a home: neo-Georgian brick, an auditorium he called his living room, and 4,500 lamps worked from the largest switchboard in the world. He renamed it after himself in 1910 and ran it for 24 years and 47 shows. In 1909 he added a ten-room duplex on the roof, reached by a private lift, with a Napoleonic museum and a Gothic room lit by hidden switches; he worked there at night and rang an electric bell every hour so the staff would know he was all right. In 1911 he staged here his own play about a dead man who comes back, The Return of Peter Grimm, after reading the psychical researchers and cutting a seance because in rehearsal it struck him as ridiculous. He died on 14 May 1931 — not in the theatre but at the Hotel Gladstone — and Broadway has said ever since that he never left. In the trade press of his own profession that story cannot be found at all: the earliest printed appearance we can date is 1984. The theatre is still working; the duplex has been shut since 1931.

David Belasco laid the cornerstone of this house on 5 December 1906, and he did it as a piece of theatre. The cast of his current hit, The Rose of the Rancho, stood and watched while its leading lady, Blanche Bates, spread the mortar and said she hoped "Mr. Belasco will stick to all of us, and that we and all his friends will stick to Mr. Belasco, as this mortar will eternally stick to this stone." The architect was George Keister, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission is blunt about who was really designing: Belasco "had input into every aspect of its planning", from the seating to the stage elevator to the lighting. Keister gave him neo-Georgian brick — an idiom for houses, not for playhouses — because the point was domesticity. Belasco wanted a theatre that felt like his home, "where guests would visit his 'living room' for an evening's entertainment", and he wanted it small: "I like a moderate sized, even small theater for most plays," he said, "because of the intimacy, the close contact which permits the closest observation, so that the most delicate and subtle touches, intonations and glances — the fluttering of an eyelid, the trembling of a lip, the tense tremor of nervous fingers shall not be obscured." It opened on 16 October 1907 as the Stuyvesant, with a play by amateurs, A Grand Army Man, which ran 149 performances. His own house paper announced the "Opening of Belasco's New Stuyvesant". He renamed it the Belasco in 1910, when his first theatre reverted to Hammerstein's Republic, and he ran it for 24 years and 47 productions. What he spent the money on was light. The house carried 4,500 electric lamps worked from what was then the largest and most flexible switchboard in the world; the ceiling was ground glass lit from behind "to give the impression of 'real daylight'", set with 22 stained-glass panels; the fixtures were by Tiffany Studios; and eighteen mural panels by Everett Shinn ringed the auditorium in what the commission calls "an arc of atmospheric intimacy". In 1917 he abolished the footlights altogether and threw all the light from above, "as in nature". Then he moved in. Two alteration permits of 1909 — numbers 928-09 and 2552-09 — record the ten-room duplex he built on the roof, above the office wing, reached by a private lift from backstage. Inside were a crypt-like case for his ancient glass, a Napoleonic museum with a much-prized lock of the emperor's hair, a Japanese bedroom, a library, a dining room, and the Gothic Room, where medieval art and erotica sat together under hidden switches. He worked there at night. At the memorial after his death a friend remembered the electric bell in the studio that Belasco rang every hour so the staff downstairs would know he was all right. He kept rebuilding the auditorium too: new orchestra boxes and eastern balcony stairs in 1919, another rooftop room in 1920, extra seats in 1928. That same year, for Molnár's Mima, he sheathed his own orchestra boxes and balcony in metal and turned the "living room" into something closer to the engine room of a battleship. He was 73 and lost a quarter of a million dollars on it. Four years after opening he staged, in this theatre, the most famous American stage ghost of his generation. The Return of Peter Grimm opened on 17 October 1911 and ran 231 performances, with David Warfield playing a dead man who comes back. Belasco explained in 1919 how he prepared it: he read "standard books on psychic phenomena", naming James H. Hyslop's Psychical Research and the Resurrection and Fremont Rider's Are the Dead Alive?, and "had several long talks with Professor James". He first wrote a séance with a woman medium and cut it — "in rehearsals it impressed me as ridiculous" — and gave the sight of the ghost to a child instead. The end came slowly. In October 1930, out of town in Baltimore with Tonight or Never, he was put to bed with what local doctors called a cold; back in New York it was pneumonia, and a lung had to be tapped. He missed the Broadway opening — the only premiere he ever missed in 24 years — and when he came back in March 1931 the company gave the show a second opening for his benefit. It was the last one he attended. He died on 14 May 1931 of a coronary embolism, and not in the theatre. Variety reported that at the bedside in the Hotel Gladstone were his surviving daughter Reina, wife of the producer Morris Gest, and his doctor; Belasco knew he was going and asked for his daughter to be sent for. The performance at the Belasco that night was not interrupted. President Herbert Hoover's message of regret was read on a half-hour memorial broadcast from WOR; Margaret Anglin read Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem", having asked which verse he had loved; messages came from Mrs. Leslie Carter, Frances Starr and Blanche Bates, who had laid the mortar in 1906. The apartment was emptied by order of Reina Belasco Gest. From 8 to 12 December 1931, in five afternoon sessions, the American Art Association·Anderson Galleries sold 1,179 lots of it — glass, porcelain, ivories, arms and armour, tapestries, the Belasco Napoleonic Collection, and an Italian chair whose back panel carried an inscription claiming it was "made from an old carved pew taken from the church in which Shakespeare is buried in Stratford-on-Avon". Five truckloads of curios went out of the building; his books went to the New York Public Library and some of the panelling to the "Belasco Room" at Sardi's. The theatre itself was left alone. Katharine Cornell leased it from 21 September 1931 and staged six productions with her husband Guthrie McClintic. After that it went from hand to hand: sold in 1934 to Mrs. Elmer Rice, foreclosed and bought back by the Belasco estate in 1936, sold in 1944 and again in 1948, and then stripped of its orchestra seats to serve from 1949 to 1953 as an NBC radio playhouse broadcasting Eddie Cantor's quiz show Take It or Leave It. It returned to the legitimate stage in 1953. In 1975 the seats came out again for a cabaret staging of The Rocky Horror Show, which lasted 45 performances. Facade and interior were both designated New York City landmarks on 4 November 1987, and the Shubert Organization, which says the house came under its ownership in 1948 and restored it in 2010, runs it today.

The Belasco is a working Broadway theatre at 111 West 44th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, owned and run by the Shubert Organization; tickets go through Telecharge, and in August 2026 the tenant was the musical Maybe Happy Ending. There is no ghost tour, no paranormal event and nothing on sale about the haunting: the Shubert page mentions the rumour in one sentence of its house history and leaves it there. What you can actually see is the reason the interior was designated in 1987 — the commission's own criterion was that it is "customarily open and accessible to the public". A ticket buys you Everett Shinn's murals around the proscenium and above the surviving boxes, the ground-glass ceiling with its twenty-two stained-glass panels and its shields of dramatists, the stained-glass column capitals and the Tiffany fixtures. Be warned that the report of 1987 already noted that many of the Tiffany pieces had been taken down to prevent theft, that air-conditioning grilles have been cut through the murals above the boxes, and that the auditorium is painted in a way that does the ornament no favours. The one thing visitors ask for is the one thing that is not available. Belasco's rooftop duplex is not part of the tour and never has been; it has been shut and largely empty since 1931, and both of the documented visits — the Hamlet company in 1995 and The New Yorker in 2006 — needed the Shubert Organization's permission, went in by flashlight because there is no power, and are described in print as a climb over debris and a dead pigeon. Do not ask at the box office. Access, from the Shubert Organization's own accessibility page: the main entrance has two small steps and there is a step-free side entrance if you tell staff on arrival. There are no lifts or escalators. The orchestra is step-free and has eight wheelchair locations and five transfer seats; the mezzanine is one flight up and the balcony another, with about two steps between rows and a handrail. There is an accessible toilet; the other toilets are a flight below the orchestra and on the upper levels. The house has induction loops for T-coil hearing aids, and infrared assisted-listening and neck-loop receivers can be borrowed at the Shubert Audience Services kiosk — reservations are recommended. Closed captioning is available on your own phone through the GalaPro app. Times Square–42nd Street and 42nd Street–Bryant Park are both two blocks south.