Here’s a video from NBC 4 in New York City of the raising of Broadway’s Palace Theatre:
Using time lapse technology, this video speeds up the four month process that raised the 14-million pound theatre 30′ up to make room for retail and entertainment space beneath it. It took 34 hydraulic jacks raising a quarter of an inch per hour.
The Palace Theatre, located at 1564 Broadway in New York City is a Broadway theatre. Designed by architects Kirchoff & Rose, the theater was funded by Martin Beck and opened in 1913. From its opening to about 1929, the Palace was considered among vaudeville performers as the flagship of Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee’s Keith-Albee theatre circuit of vaudeville theatres. As of 2018, the theater had 1,743 seats. A New York City-designated landmark, the auditorium contains ornately designed plasterwork, boxes on the side walls, and two balcony levels.
The Palace was most successful as a vaudeville house in the 1910s and 1920s. Under RKO Theatres, it became a movie palace called the RKO Palace Theatre in the 1930s, though it continued to host intermittent vaudeville shows in the 1950s. The Nederlander Organization purchased the Palace in 1965 and reopened the venue as a Broadway theater the next year. The theater closed for an extensive renovation from 1987 to 1991, when the original building was demolished and replaced with the DoubleTree Suites Times Square Hotel. The DoubleTree Hotel was itself demolished in 2019 to make way for the TSX Broadway development. The Palace closed again in 2018 and is being lifted 30 feet as part of the TSX Broadway development.
