How NYC’s massive Palace Theater was lifted into the air: ‘An inch an hour’

Putting up a Broadway exhibit is challenging more than enough. 

But consider lifting a 111-12 months-outdated, 7,000-ton Broadway theater 30 toes in the air. 

Which is just what a group of intrepid engineers and designers have carried out to the Palace Theater, the legendary 47th Road location that is played host to this kind of luminaries as Judy Garland, her daughter Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler and typical musicals like “Sweet Charity” and “La Cage Aux Folles.”

During a painstaking procedure that took nearly 9 a long time from signing the contracts to the May 2024 opening night time of Ben Platt’s live performance residency, the massive making — which has also acted as a vaudeville residence and an RKO motion picture theater — was radically jacked up two tales to make room for a new 669-place resort and retail spaces beneath.

The Palace alone also bought a a great deal-required spruce-up. The lobbies, backstage places and, most vitally, the bogs, are entirely new.

“We may argue, and some may perhaps agree, that it is the most well-known theater in the town of New York,” Nick Scandalios, Government Vice President of the Nederlander Organization, instructed The Article.

“And we’re seriously proud that at the conclude of this, it is however the pinnacle of that.” 

Following the Palace shuttered in 2018 with the closing of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the extended procedure of prepping the theater for the move started. That action on your own took quite a few many years.

When the famous site is landmarked by the metropolis, a designation that can lead to permissions hurdles, the group got blessed with a quirk.

“The Palace is incredibly unique because it was an encased brick box with no facade,” Scandalios stated of the location that earlier had only a little marquee that was much more recent than the household.

“Many of our landmarked theaters are landmarked equally inside and exterior. But there was no outside the house to the Palace,” he included.

At the identical time that the attached Double Tree lodge was demolished above, 116 cement-cased hydraulic lifts have been placed beneath the basis of the building. The true carry, on the other hand, didn’t start out right until February 2022.

Jim Seger of PBDW Architects reported that about the system of two months, the Palace moved up at a slower-than-a-snail’s pace of “about an inch an hour.”

Extra preservation architect Brigitte Cook dinner: “The pigeons on the roof couldn’t really feel it moving.” 

“It was like surgical treatment,” Seger extra. “There ended up groups on contact at all occasions. Anything was becoming watched really carefully.”

As soon as the Palace attained its taller stature — with no important challenges — the remodel actually began. The entrance is now prominently noticeable on 47th Road, there are sparkling lobbies and modernized backstage services.

And behold — the Palace now has the largest women’s bathroom of any Broadway theater. For matinee ladies, it is almost the ninth question of the environment.

Within the theater, illuminating its darkish blue palate with gold accents, is an stylish new chandelier impressed by the only photo of the prolonged-absent authentic fixture.

“You made use of to look up at the ceiling and the dome experienced these recessed lights since there was no chandelier, and you couldn’t glance up without remaining blinded,” Cook mentioned. “We took the first chandelier dimensions and shape, but extra art moderne [style] in a up to date way.”

1 historic element beloved by Broadway buffs that had to stay was the iconic Judy Garland Staircase. 

“Judy Garland experienced quite famously appeared from the again of the auditorium at times,” Scandalios claimed. “And there is a staircase she utilized that could join you from the backstage to the back again of the auditorium.”

So, the team ensured that long term divas could still stroll in Dorothy Gale’s footsteps.

“It’s a little bit extra circuitous, but there is a route that can go from backstage, via that staircase and then enter the auditorium,” he said.

For James L. Nederlander, president of the Nederlander Group, the Palace challenge was a deeply personalized a person.

“My father purchased it 1964,” he stated of his dad James M. Nederlander, who died in 2016.  

“I grew up there. A lot of recollections. Which is one more purpose I’m happy it’s back again on line. I hope he’s up there declaring, ‘Boy, I’m very pleased of you fellas.’”