Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll get details on a $65 million renovation of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. We’ll also find out why public defenders from the Legal Aid Society are threatening to strike.
Neverson Cadesca, a singer who performs under the name Nev, figures in a footnote about the storied Apollo Theater in Harlem. He was the last performer at the last Amateur Night before the Apollo closed for a $65 million renovation. It won’t reopen until sometime next year.
How did his set go? “Performing-wise, I felt really good,” he said later. He wasn’t booed off the stage by a crowd that was as raucous as Amateur Night crowds always are. But he didn’t win, either. The $20,000 prize went to Emanuel Garilus, a saxophonist from Gainesville, Fla. Even Cadesca was impressed. “I want to play with that guy,” he said.
“Be good or be gone” has long been the slogan of Amateur Night, the competition that propelled careers long before “American Idol” came along. It started in 1934 and eventually gave rise to the television program “Showtime at the Apollo.” Over the years Ella Fitzgerald, the Jackson Five, James Brown and Stevie Wonder all survived Amateur Night. So did Luther Vandross, although he was booed off a couple of times before he won.
But now Amateur Night itself will be gone — except perhaps for a special or two — while the Apollo is reconfiguring seats, removing a wall or two and repainting nearly everything.
“This is just a pause,” Michelle Ebanks, the president and chief executive of the Apollo, said reassuringly as she talked about “the magic of what happens on that stage” during an Amateur Night show. Much of the Apollo’s other programming will continue at its Apollo Stages at the Victoria down the block, where the Apollo has two smaller theaters in a complex that also includes a 211-room hotel and 200 apartments.
Ebanks is well aware that the work at the Apollo is not just any renovation. “It’s a 108-year-old building, and it’s the Apollo Theater, you know?” Ebanks said. “It’s always been more than a stage. This is an opportunity to restore and in some cases modernize an institution.”
The Apollo says the building has never undergone such an extensive renovation, but it long ago lost its original configuration with an orchestra pit. A production studio for television broadcasts was added in the 1980s, along with air-conditioning. Another refurbishing in the early 2000s touched up the facade and the marquee outside and installed wider seats inside.
This time, the plans call for a larger lobby with a cafe and bar. New windows will look out on 125th Street, making the “community feel invited in,” said Chris Cowan, a partner with Beyer Blinder Belle, which is leading the project team. And the Wall of Fame, a tribute to artists who have appeared at the Apollo, is going digital.
In the theater itself, the plan is to preserve what is known as the signature wall. It’s the last thing performers see before they walk onto the stage, a wall where past performers have long signed their names. So have V.I.P.s like Barack Obama, who signed it during a fund-raiser when he was running for president in 2012.
Out in the audience, the orchestra-level seats will be reconfigured. Upstairs, the mezzanine and balcony seats will be refurbished. And there will be a new sound system.
“It was a house built for vaudeville, not amplified sound,” Cowan said. “It’s a different environment now. These new systems will help the performers as much as they help the audience.”
Weather
It will be mostly cloudy with a high near 88 degrees. Showers and thunderstorms are likely. The wet weather will continue tonight, with mostly cloudy conditions and a low near 74.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until the Fourth of July (Friday).
The latest New York news
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A migrant shelter closes: The Roosevelt Hotel, where more than 155,000 migrants received housing, medical care and legal advice after entering the country, is no longer operating as a shelter.
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Rent increases for a million apartments: The Rent Guidelines Board, controlled by Mayor Eric Adams, rejected Zohran Mamdani’s calls for a rent freeze, recommending increases of at least 3 percent.
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Deciding Combs’s fate: The jury in the sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial of the music mogul Sean Combs began its deliberations.
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Shooting near the Stonewall Inn: Two teenagers were shot near the Stonewall Inn, an icon of L.G.B.T.Q. history. The police said it was unclear if the shooting was related to Sunday’s Pride march.
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Mamdani on “Meet the Press”: Zohran Mamdani, the likely winner of New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, discussed his plans to tax the city’s wealthiest residents and to make New York more affordable.
Legal Aid lawyers authorize a strike
Lawyers with the Legal Aid Society, who represent the city’s poorest defendants in state courts, have authorized their union to strike but have not set a strike deadline, according to Jane Fox, a staff attorney with Legal Aid who is the chair of the union.
A walkout would come after months of negotiations and would leave the courts scrambling to cope with the sudden absence of more than 1,000 lawyers.
The issue is pay. The union rejected an offer of a 4 percent increase for one year, saying it was not enough to keep experienced lawyers from leaving. Union members want to be paid as much as federal defenders in New York, where a base salary for a trial attorney starts at around $115,400. The current starting salary for Legal Aid attorneys in the low $80,000 range.
Some Legal Aid lawyers have had to take second jobs to pay the bills. Others have quit, leaving the remaining staff at “a breaking point,” Fox said. In the Bronx, where Legal Aid is the primary defense organization, 24 lawyers are responsible for all of the felony cases, down from nearly 80 several years ago, she said.
Twyla Carter, the chief executive of the Legal Aid Society, agreed with the union that the lawyers are underpaid. “The Legal Aid Society has long recognized this inequity and, over the past three years, has made significant headway in its efforts — in Albany, at City Hall, and beyond — to secure the additional funding needed to begin meaningfully addressing this longstanding funding problem,” she said in a statement on Monday.
Carter said that staff attorneys had received or been offered base salary increases equivalent to 17 percent over the last three years and that a retention bonus of $6,500 was instituted in 2024. The new offer would make increases “at key points along the salary scale” and provide “other much-needed benefit improvements for staff attorneys,” she said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Magic purse
Dear Diary:
Some years ago, I stayed at a friend’s loft on Bleecker Street off Bowery while in a peripatetic phase of apartment sitting.
On a particularly sweltering night after a movie date on the Upper West Side that, except for the air-conditioning, was utterly futile, I decided to walk back to the loft.
Sweaty, broke, discouraged and still not even halfway there, I sat down on a stone bench near the Plaza Hotel, the Pulitzer Fountain and, to my left, the Paris Theater.
Slumped over, I spotted something striped beneath the bench: a black-and-white change purse.
I picked it up and opened it. Inside were two peppermint candies, no ID and what was to me a financial windfall: a $5 bill and some change.
Silently, I thanked the figure whose statue sits atop the fountain. As I later learned, she is Pomona, goddess of abundance. Feeling new strength, I picked myself up and resumed my walk downtown.
The five dollars was soon gone, but the magic of that striped change purse has stayed with me.
— Tilden Russell
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Luke Caramanico 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 The Apollo Theater’s Home, 108 Years Old, Gets a Refresh appeared first on New York Times.
