Mark Hellinger Theater (Formerly Hollywood Theater)

History and architecture

The Mark Hellinger Theater survives today as one of the few intact grand movie palaces in Manhattan, as well as one of the historic theaters that symbolize American theater for both New York and the nation. Built for Warner Brothers in 1929 as the Hollywood Theater, it showcased movies and then vaudeville until 1934, when it was first converted for use as a legitimate theater.

Warner Brothers was one of the great studios dominating American film making in the 1920s. Having successfully developed sound movies, the company in 1928 embarked on a campaign to buy or build theaters in which to exhibit its new sound productions. In 1929, Warner Brothers hired Thomas Lamb to build a Broadway/Times Square showcase, the Hollywood Theater, to compete with the rival Paramount and Roxy theaters. The Hollywood was the last of the great movie palaces erected in the Times Square area during the 1910s and 1920s, and the only one there surviving intact today.

Thomas Lamb was New York's most prolific designer of movie theaters. Although active also in legitimate theater design, Lamb is best known for his more than 300 movie theaters, built all over the world. Of the enormous movie palaces he designed in New York, the Hollywood is one of the few surviving intact. Lamb's design for the Hollywood, one of his last before the Depression put an end to the building of movie palaces, is extravagant within and most unusual without. Inside, the theater exhibits a lavish display of Baroque-inspired gilded plaster statuary and wall and ceiling paintings, in the tradition of the great movie palaces. The Hollywood's exterior, however, is an unusual combination of modernistic elements.

Beyond its significance as the last built and sole intact survivor of the great midtown movie palaces, the Hollywood/Mark Hellinger also represents a typical and important aspect of the nation's theatrical history. Converted for the legitimate stage just five years after its construction, and later renamed for columnist, screenwriter and producer Mark Hellinger, the Hellinger has shared in the history of Broadway theater, and has served as home for half a century to countless numbers of the plays through which the Broadway theater has come to personify American theater. As such, it continues to help define the Broadway theater district, the largest and most famous concentration of legitimate stage theaters in the world.