Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll get a glimpse of a $100 million renovation plan for Studio 54. We’ll also find out how a rest stop for delivery workers took shape near City Hall in fewer than 100 days.
There’s a dressing room in a theater on West 54th Street with an old-fashioned vault that might make a safecracker think twice. What was inside, back in the day?
“I think you can guess,” said Christopher Nave. “Cash and drugs.”
Nave is an executive with the Roundabout Theater Company, which moved into the building in 1998 and kept its disco-era name, Studio 54. Now Roundabout has a $100 million plan for the first full-scale renovation of the building. The project would bring back a permanent stage, which the building hasn’t had since its disco days, and an orchestra pit.
“It’s a real passion project for everyone here,” said Christopher Ashley, who will become Roundabout’s artistic director in July. “Everybody has an emotional relationship to that space.” He said the renovation would “hold on to the essence of the building” while bringing the lighting and sound systems up-to-date and making it accessible.
If only you could get in
Studio 54 was the disco that seemed to define a certain celebrity-obsessed moment in the 1970s. It was famous as the trendsetter’s haunt for those who were trendy enough to be allowed in. Andy Warhol, who was one of them, famously said there was “a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor.”
There was also an accounting system that Steve Rubell, who ran Studio 54 with Ian Schrager, once described as “cash in, cash out and skim.” Both of them went to prison for income-tax evasion. Schrager was pardoned by President Barack Obama. Rubell died in 1989.
The stage disappeared when the floor was leveled for the disco. Whenever Roundabout brings in a new production, a temporary stage has to be built after the set has been brought in and raised almost to the rafters. “They then drop the set down,” said Jane Lin, Roundabout’s director of real estate.
Hello, television. Goodbye, orchestra pit.
As for the orchestra pit, the theater, which began life as an opera house in the 1920s, was built with one. But in the 1950s, the building was turned into a television studio and became home to the children’s program “Captain Kangaroo” and game shows like “To Tell the Truth” and “What’s My Line,” as well as the soap opera “Love of Life.”
The pit was covered over to create a platform that could support the television cameras. When Roundabout has staged musicals like “Kiss Me Kate” or the current production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” it has positioned the musicians in what were originally box seats.
Roundabout’s renovation plan calls for a throwback out front: a blade sign, spelling out “Roundabout” vertically. The marquee would carry the name Studio 54. Roundabout, which wants the construction work to start in 2029, hired the architect and designer David Rockwell and the firm Ennead Architects.
Nave said the theater had raised $45 million for the project. Roundabout is seeking a total of $30 million from the city — it has received $14.5 million so far, Nave said — and is also seeking funding from New York State. To generate additional money for the project, Roundabout has asked the city to let it sell developers in the theater district the bonus floor area rights that Roundabout stands to receive as a result of the rehabilitation work.
The renovated Studio 54 will have fewer seats. Nave said the plan calls for 990, down from 1,001 now. But there will be more seats in the orchestra and the front mezzanine, Nave said, and “the worst seats in the rear balcony” would be taken out. The sight lines will also be better than they are now.
But about that vault. What will happen to it?
“We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do with that,” Lin said. “Maybe take it apart and reassemble it” somewhere else in the building.
Weather
Expect sunny skies with temperatures near 50. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 37.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended (Passover)
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There’s a difference between politics and activism. He’s growing into that.” — Emmanuel Oladejo, 26, an accountant and nursing student, on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is nearing the 100th day of his term.
The latest New York news
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Mamdani names new A.C.S. head: Rebecca Jones Gaston, who oversaw child welfare efforts for President Joseph R. Biden Jr., will be the city’s child welfare commissioner. In past roles, Jones Gaston, who was once in foster care, spoke of the need to strike a balance between policing families too much and not policing them enough.
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Mamdani attended “Seder in the Street”: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has observed the Passover holiday in several ways in recent days, including a visit to the “Seder in the Street,” hosted by a left-wing group.
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Hacking suspect extradited to New York: Amit Forlit, who was charged by federal prosecutors with running a global hacking operation for a lobbying group that aimed to thwart environmental lawsuits against oil companies, will stand trial in New York.
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MoMA opens “Marcel Duchamp”: A survey of works by the artist Marcel Duchamp opens on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. Duchamp took commonplace objects and displayed them as artworks he called “readymades,” eventually weaving a conceptual thread into postwar art.
A rest stop for delivery workers, built fast
A rest stop for delivery workers was proposed years ago. Then Mayor Zohran Mamdani decided that it should be built on the site of a former newsstand near City Hall, and fast — within his first 100 days in office.
By the time Mamdani was sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1, the proposal for a deliverers’ hub had bounced around city government. Some did not like the location outside City Hall: “Having a bike and scooter pileup there is going to cause chaos,” said Joann Ariola, a City Councilwoman from Queens. Delivery workers were disappointed that the new structure would not have bathrooms. (There was no water hookup nearby, according to the Parks Department, which owns the site.)
But Mamdani and his top aides decided they wanted the hub completed during the mayor’s first 100 days in office, which meant a deadline of April 12, said Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for the mayor. Then the timeline was shortened even more, because leaders including Senator Chuck Schumer wanted to schedule a ribbon-cutting ceremony for April 7. Schumer and Mayor Eric Adams had announced in 2022 that they had secured $1 million in federal funding for the project.
My colleague Christopher Maag writes that the race against the clock was on. Engineers at Boyce Technologies, located in an industrial zone in Long Island City, Queens, worked overtime to engineer and build components for the rest stop — and figure out how to assemble them on the sidewalk. The schedule left no time to apply for a permit to bring a crane to City Hall. So Hugo Arias, a welder at Boyce, fabricated a piece of bent steel to do the lifting, with a cable, a winch and a forklift.
“To build a structure in New York City in, what, 48 hours?” said J. Manuel Mansylla, the director of Fantástica, the company that designed the shelter. “That’s as fast as it gets.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Bad nanny
Dear Diary:
My young son was scaling a structure at a playground in Central Park. I was on a bench nearby with a novel. I had one eye on him and one on my book.
I was 28 and two years into my new life in New York City. I might have felt like a proper New Yorker, but my strong British accent gave me away. My son preferred first names to something like “Mummy.”
“Sarah!” he called. “Play with me.”
“In a minute,” I said. “Let me finish this chapter.”
Two other mothers had been watching. One shook her head.
“You’re a bad nanny,” she said. “Sitting there reading your book. Go play with the boy.”
I carried on reading.
The other woman leaned forward.
“You need to give me your employer’s name and number,” she said. “They should know you’re not doing your job.”
I dutifully gave her my husband’s name and our home number. She wrote it down carefully.
She never called.
— Sarah Hunt
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A $100 Million Plan to Make Studio 54 a First-Class Theater appeared first on New York Times.
