Anco Cinema

In 1903, producer Fred R. Hamlin and producer/director Julian Mitchell had a big Broadway hit with The Wizard of Oz, a musical staging of the L. Frank Baum story, and they had another with Babes in Toyland, a Victor Herbert[3] operetta, later in the year.

[7] The same year, comedians Joe Weber[8] and Lew Fields[9] ended their decades-long partnership, giving their final show May 28, at the New Amsterdam Theatre.

[11] Their first offering was a new Victor Herbert operetta, It Happened in Nordland, with libretto and lyrics by Glen MacDonough,[12] starring Fields and Marie Cahill,[13] together with a burlesque of The Music Master, a current hit play.

)[21] In the first week of February 1907, Hammerstein sold the theater to Henry B. Harris,[22] the theatrical producer who bought the Hudson Theatre the next year and built the Folies-Bergere in 1911.

[26] The New York City government announced the same year that it would widen 42nd Street, requiring that the Lew Fields Theatre's lobby and marquee be modified.

[33] When the Selwyn & Co. lease expired on July 1, 1920, Harris's widow sold the theater to H. H. Frazee, a producer and theater owner and owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team,[34] who again made renovations and opened the Frazee Theatre with a new play September 7: The Woman of Bronze, starring Margaret Anglin, which ran for 252 performances.

[35] Dulcy, a comedy by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, opened on August 13, 1921, made Lynn Fontanne a star, and ran through March 11, 1922.

The last was called Find the Fox, and its third performance, on Saturday evening, June 21, 1930, brought the legitimate career of this theater to an end.

According to Henderson, "Cohen bought the land underneath Wallack's in 1940 ... tore out the second balcony, put stadium seating in the orchestra" and replaced the facade "with a windowless sheet of bland stucco.

[49] The same year, the City University of New York's Graduate Center hosted an exhibition with photographs of several nearby theaters to advocate for the area's restoration.

[52][53] The Urban Development Corporation (UDC), an agency of the New York state government, proposed redeveloping the area around a portion of West 42nd Street in 1981.

[59][60][61] Government officials hoped that development of the theaters would finally allow the construction of the four towers around 42nd Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue.

[63] By 1995, real-estate development firm Forest City Ratner was planning a $150 million entertainment and retail complex on the site of the Empire, Harris, and Liberty theaters.