Victory victorious.

The Victory Theatre opened in 1900 on the cobbled prairie known as 42nd Street as The Theatre Republic, built by Oscar Hammerstein I with a play starring John Barrymore. 

In 1902, impresario David Belasco named it for himself and opened the famous play Abie's Irish Rose, the longest running play in its day. After Belasco named another theatre for himself on 44th Street, the house was renamed simply The Republic.

From 1931 to 1941, Bill Minsky owned it as ran it as NYCs first big burlesque house called Minsky's Burlesque. Its most famous act was Gypsy Rose Lee. His most infamous act? Tearing the grand staircase off the front of the building.

!n 1941, it became a movie theatre named The Victory to support American troops in WWII.

It did a stint as a television studio!

In 1972, it became the first theatre to show pornographic films.

Times Square and 42nd Street fell into neglect, poverty, and despair.

But in the early 1990s, and you hear me say this all the time, the artists moved in. The city had taken control of The Victory and all of the the theaters along 42nd Street and invited artists to do installations in the deteriorating spaces. The marquees along the stretch were filled with poetic aphorisms that made commuters stop and look and think.

The Theatre for a New Audience staged Romeo and Juliet in the water-stained filthy shell of The New Victory. People showed up.

And people started to notice. 

(Including the Disney Corporation who struck a deal with the city to revitalize the entire block.)

The New Victory was entirely restored to its Edwardian splendor, the grand staircase was rebuilt, magnificent torchieres greeted audience members, and the New Victory now does a season of vital, well-attended, children's programming.

A beautiful important theatre, visually and historically, falls on hard times, is abandoned, and it is the artists that make us see it new again so that new life is breathed into the forgotten.